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Death, you are everywhere; you have claimed me.
Your long-toothed mortician is always strolling
The busy streets, thrusting a hand of friendship
To such-a-one and such-a-one who by
The time they hobble to their lodging know
Too well the crusty leprous wart upon
Their wrist portends the whispered midnight meeting,
When the veiled clinician with his piercing eyes
Will cast a pall across their withered faces
And barely-pleading lips, and with a lurch
Unmanning all the stubborn struts of place
They’ll hurtle horrified into a soot-black
Otherness where neither span nor compass
Provides a measure to define their state.
Their bodies heaped upon a flustered bed
Or slumped like thrown-off clothes upon the floor,
They’ve gone into a glade where none who tread
The path’s unctuous mud can follow – yet.
Oh
why then, why, should Ezechias beg
The
Lord that, sick to death, He drag him backFrom midnight’s poising to depart? The tock
Of fifteen years was granted, sweated with
Anguish that summer’s drowsy, fly-pocked stream
At depth was flushing by in dailiness,
Until once more, his face pressed to the wall,
A hand would seize his elbow and require
He turn his eyes to parley with the doom
Prevarication had trumped up in terror.
How blessed are those whom death took cleanly young!
Therefore
young friend, spared now, one day you’ll know
On
waking that unwelcomely besiegedBy these pains and those pains you’re fit to die,
That ill-health’s ashy skin, ebb energy
And slacken-mouth despair are preludes to
The pitiless denouement of extinction.
Be it dog, absconded ram or palsied man
Fallen in briars, those carcases will rot
To stenching muddy molecules; and if
There’s any glorious rassemblement,
It’s only after Physics’ glossy strings
Cut by the weaver have snapped back to allow
Your plummet like a splay-limbed infant slipped
From the goodwife’s hands. Oh friend, sundered in
Extremis, pinioned against death’s gate,
Sorrow’s quittance beckons; go through, why wait?
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© March 2014
