August 23, 2010

• ElectricPoetry: Death and Dying

  

  NOTE: The first poem is new. The others have been posted here on the blog in the past.

  "Existential Pallbearer"
  Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
  8/22/10 9:12 p.m. pdt

  Somebody else always dies
  Sometimes I think they're just dropping like flies
  No need to try to answer the whys
  This is only truth, don't stagnate with lies

  I shall lift the casket with ease
  Send it to heaven, aloft through the trees
  Out on the ocean, adrift on the seas
  Or where ever imagined if you please

  The end's the beginning I've said that for years
  But that doesn't stifle the hurt or the tears
  Knowing's no comfort, the pain really sears
  And nothing can really erase all the fears

  I bid you goodbye like a really good friend
  Even though I wasn't there at the end
  I remember the good times around the bend
  And shan't ever wear the clothes that I rend

  Next time I see you I'll be at your side
  If wishes were horses we surely will ride
  around memory's his'try and time we will bide
  Cause I will be gone soon in time and with tide

  So long and forever your heart still and gone
  We shared some love and good times my friend
  I wish I'd made more of an attempt all along
  Before your ship sailed to connect once anon.

   

  "Mortality"
  Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
  3/27/07 7:28am pdt

  We only experience the pain of loss
  The dead cannot console us with their presence
  We don't claim to understand
  No amount of care or grief can eradicate the
  final fact of life.

  We pray,
  We shed tears of sadness
  We embrace the memories of fullness
  which existed along with the lives of
  our deceased

  Impermanence is permanent
  Surprise and shock reign supreme
  Sadness, eloquence,
  Memory, sustenance
  Simple plans gone awry too often

  As the physical body ages,
  and as the sands of time
  fall through the glass
  ever faster
  and more erratic
  loss becomes normalcy
  eventually

  The longer one's life exists,
  the more apt other lives are
  to cease this existence,
  until loss,
  although never mundane or routine
  seems somewhat normal
  as others who lived
  now do not.

  When the rapid amount of loss
  weighs heavy on the soul,
  grief turns to questioning again
  Even after decades of knowledge
  display to the living that mortality
  severs the cords of
  both the most righteous
  and the most callous
  Nothing prepares this life
  for the loss of another.

  And surely nothing prepares this life
  for the succeeding loss of yet
  another,
  and yet another.

  But time is not cognizant of mortality's blade,
  and memory will soon become all that is
  left of another life, now deceased
  until memory dies
  and mortality appears on the doorstep
  with hat in hand

  The reaper is not a grim figure
  but a sullen sad and lonely cipher
  suddenly showing up to declare
  our mortality survives
  even as our lives are eradicated

  
  "The Constant PallBearer"
  Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
  June 25, 2005 7:25 a.m. pdt

  Mom and Dad, I miss you both immensely
  Even though I fear I forget your faces oftentimes
  The shiny white walls of the hospitals never glistened for me
  And when they put your bodies in the ground
  The walls could fade and burnish, lose their lustre,
  And for me this was a revelation of respect
  I will talk to you in silence, free from those hospital walls
  Free from the sickening alcohol smells
  And the overweight nursing staff with their
  pinned up hosiery
  Plodding through the halls with the shiny walls
  Those are not missed at all

  Tom, I never even gave you the respect
  of visiting you in those halls of dissolution
  The sights and sounds and smells of sickness
  didn't touch me as we telephoned our concerns
  And seeming lack, as we knew you
  would never walk again, but we didn' t know
  you would never breathe either.
  The casket was incredibly heavy
  holding your girth and weight,
  which, now, has gone the way of the worm
  leaving nothing but raucous memories
  weaving between the wormwood

  Bob, I will never forget
  you, lying, naked on the bathroom floor
  No hospitals for you, just another
  evening trip to the shi**er, the last trip.
  Joel banging on the door
  needing to take a pi** and you wouldn't open it
  because your life was gone,
  and no matter what we did
  you wouldn't be revived.
  47 seems like such a young age to leave

  Cutedog, I still grieve for your passing,
  The disease never showed itself on your website
  Only happy bunnies and blooming flowers
  Only your words of comfort hovering
  over someone's perceived sadness
  But never yours
  The day I "visited" you on the internet
  and the website remained in limbo
  for a while
  but you weren't around to update anymore
  It had been a while since you had left
  But I didn't know
  And now I do

  Dan you were so full of life
  The 'Crazy Canuck' with a beer and a joint
  Still living in the same neighborhood in Toronto
  where you grew up.
  Working at the same elementary school
  you attended
  You traveled, you had many friends,
  You always came back to SoCal to see us
  and we had such grand times
  Until that day last year Joel called and
  you couldn't answer becuase that pneumonia
  stifled your presence forever
  and you weren't even 50
  We still can't believe you are gone

  The souls of humankind gather together in eternity
  On Earth we become pallbearers for existence
  We pray, we plead, we shed a tear, and we go on
  for a while at least, until it is our time.
  We command soulgrief and we carry the
  weight of time's coffin until we lay down for the last time

  The burden of existence is not carried by the dead
  They are free of all bothersome questioning
  Until that time as we are released from our burden
  we will worry, we will mourn, and we will remember
  and at some future time, perhaps in a decade
  perhaps in a couple of minutes,
  we will join Mom, Dad, Tom, Bob, and Dan in eternity
  And we might be mourned until
  our mourners join us as well
  in the place nobody knows exists
  but everybody will experience
  at the time that someone else
  becomes the constant pallbearer

  ---

  BEHIND THE POETRY: Not to be morbid here I hope, but the last fact of life is death, simply put. I just wrote "Existential Pallbearer" tonight, so as is my wont, I'm posting an ElectricPoetry post. It's the first poem concerning the subject of death and dying I've written since hearing of the death of my best friend "Buck" from high school, about a month ago. It begins as a simple ode to passing in general, and then specifically addresses his spirit. I missed the funeral by about three days, and hadn't spoken to Steve in about 10 years. He died of a heart attack at the age of 57. The piece is a companion to the last poem posted here, "The Constant Pallbearer", written in 2005 and specifically addressing those spirits in my life who had passed up to that point in my life, begining with my parents. Since I wrote "The Constant Pallbearer", Joel (Cancerboy) passed in 2008 (53), and Paula, the first to befriend me from the mobile home park in which I now live, passed about two months ago from complications with her one remaining lung. She was in her late 60s. The middle poem, "Mortality" from 2007 was written following the untimely passing of my friend Jim's parents from overexposure to the elements in a freak accident that winter. The title card is a new photo I took over the weekend, and is #42 in my series of ElectricPoetry title cards, which used to adorn the main page of my ElectricPoetry Group on Yahoo, and now grace the ElectricPoetry blogpost series here on Xanga. MFN/ppf

  • 12:50 am
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