* * *

We are not fair weather friends of death after all.

We stand before its closed mouth,

Engulfed in shards of rain and wind.

It's almost twenty years now.

We stand around

Reading someone else's grief and praises,

And weeping our own griefs.

There are those who lay down

Inside its open mouth

To taste the mustiness of eternity.

But we come for those it's taken.

In death the body is diminished And the soul is, what?

What can anyone say about the soul Except for precisely where it's not?