POETRY
Wafting Upon the Breeze
A poem about the transformation of death
I have known death in many forms: from grandparents and pets passing, and a nanny who raised me as my second mother; friends going out of my life, saying goodbye with a move; watching a little African boy crushed under the wheels of a car I rode in; a relationship ending. And though I have not suffered the death of a parent or a lover or my child, I cannot understand the need for spending so long in grief. Maybe because I have been fascinated with death the whole of my life since Elizabeth, the little girl next door who was born only minutes apart from me at the same hospital, died of leukemia when she was maybe five. Why take her and not me? I have made death a friend, not because death is inevitable. It’s just that the experience of who I AM makes a mockery of such a notion. So when my friend with whom I roomed with for a time, daily grieved for months over his father’s passing, these words came; which, of course, I kept to myself.
O friend, why do you grieve over
Your father’s bones?
Why do you grieve over the inevitable?
You spit in anger
That God has taken him away.
