Normally I'd have posted this in the poetry section but because it's for Anna I'm posting it in the RIP Anna thread.
Elegy for Anna:
millions of dead festoon this earth of ours;
even among the ones I know and love
too many have since passed beyond my sight
though I, like you, believe and trust
in God's great mercy, promise of eternal
life, still, the absence of you in flesh
troubles me
the illusion we imagine
to be the world we strive to inhabit
belongs to both of us. You touched my heart
with your warm kindness, often made me laugh
with your cartoons, your images, your sayings
your death broke on me like a snapping wire,
a tumbled-down pylon. How was it possible
that you, so seemingly indestructible,
amazingly cheerful always, should be laid low
by the assassin cancer?
have you abandoned our world of make-believe
for the solid realm of eternity?
are there new dreams to delight you in that world?
I am bewildered that you, such a solid thing,
should be removed from us. Surely gravity
will pull you back into the living world
again, so we may laugh and disagree
about politics, race, religion, Irish history,
and the conspiracy theories popping out
from under your tinfoil hat?
a lady, prudish even, sometimes shy,
yet full of mischief, not above implying
you swung both ways in your relationships
the thief of death stole in to your pure soul
and robbed you of your precious life
the end of all our wrangling, all our flirting,
the river of affection suddenly silted up,
your sudden absence an aching vacuum
inside the blackest hole of the universe
I hope and pray and trust that God will lift you
high up, among the sparkling stars
illuminating the sky above our night-time world
with your radiance, your passion, your sincerity
a part of me has died along with you;
it is always so when death claims one we love,
and the remaining soul must try to navigate
their course, with one less familiar trusted landmark
by which to steer our mortal ship of fools
perhaps your fragrance lingers on the airl
if so, I long to breathe in that perfume,
spray it upon myself, so that at least a fragment
of the scent may linger on, even in your absence
just as death gathers up life
within its net, so too we live
in both sides of the looking glass,
the inner and outer world
which (if either) of these worlds is real
we cannot say;
all is illusion, every self-portrait
a study in artifice
if you would come again
we'd need no words to cast their shadows
between us
each of us knows
there can be joy even in pain,
love and empathy even in separation
we have both raged
against the things we saw as unjust, evil,
even if they were not always the same things
I have wrapped around myself
the sheet of your laughter
to form a kind of keepsake
you have been torn
out of our world of bodies and desire
into a landscape with infinite curved space
and at most the mass of a neutrino
now your sundered selfhood
charges itself with the energy of the universe,
the broken fragments of you fashioned
into the kaleidoscope that is the cosmos
in the midst of life, in the midst of death,
your giant heart spills out its life blood
more powerful than millions of seeds
planted in loamy soil
can we make the return journey
from death to life to conception,
travelling back into the womb
and be again no more than the swimming tadpole
or receptive egg, that once we were?
you wove your tapestry of dreams and hopes
out of words and images, carved out upon the world
your thoughts, desires, threading into life
your vision of the world you longed for
I have shed tears for you, dear Anna,
said prayers for your soul in three languages -
German, Romanes and English -
yet all my tears
like the fountain of words
flowing from me, now that I write of yu,
are dancers at a wake. Te soves misto,
may you sleep well, meine schwesterlein,
du, wie Heine sagt,
bist sowie eine Engel
if I could call you back again,
breath on the embers of your extinguished fire
and blow it back once more to radiant heat
I'd gladly do it
the glittering stars
possess you now
schlaf wohl, pislikurja!
Author's note: I've used a few foreign words - 'te soves misto' means 'may you sleep well' in Romanes and we say it at our funerals; 'meine schwesterlein' means 'my little sister' in German;'du, wie Heine sagt' means 'you, as Heine said;'bist sowie eine Engel' means 'are so much like an angel;' 'schlaf wohl' means 'sleep well' in German and 'pislikurja' means 'darling' or 'sweetheart' in Romanes.