The power of poetry

“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

As part of Dying Matters Awareness Week, 2023 we used the power of Poetry to ignite honest and positive conversations about death and dying.

Every year communities across the country come together to reflect, to talk and perhaps inspire one another in whatever shape or form works for them.

Art and creativity have long been a rich source of expression and solace, so here at Part of Life, we wanted to provide our community with a collection of beautiful, soulful and deeply impactful poems.

Inspired by Michael Rosen’s articulation of how poetry helped him grieve after the death of his son, our poetry library is here for you to dip in and out of when and where you choose to.

If you have a favourite poem that has helped you express your feelings on death and grief, then why not share it in the comments below?

Part of Life's Poetry Library

Part of Life's Poetry Library

• Don’t Tell Me That I Mourn Too Much, by Michael Rosen

  don’t tell me that I mourn too much

  and I won’t tell you that you mourn too much

  don’t tell me that I mourn too little

  and I won’t tell you that you mourn too little

  don’t tell me that I mourn in the wrong place

  and I won’t tell you that you mourn in the wrong place

  don’t tell me that I mourn at the wrong time

  and I won’t tell you that you mourn at the wrong time

  don’t tell me that I mourn in the wrong way

  and I won’t tell you that you mourn in the wrong way

  I may get it wrong, I will get it wrong, I have got it wrong

  but don’t tell me.

• On Death, by Khalil Gibran

  Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.

  And he said:

  You would know the secret of death.

  But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

  The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.

  If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.

  For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

  In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;

  And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.

  Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

  Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.

  Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?

  Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

  For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?

  And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

  Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

  And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

  And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

  From The Prophet (Knopf, 1923).

• The Trees, by Philip Larkin

  The trees are coming into leaf
  Like something almost being said;
  The recent buds relax and spread,
  Their greenness is a kind of grief.

  Is it that they are born again
  And we grow old? No, they die too.
  Their yearly trick of looking new
  Is written down in rings of grain.

  Yet still the unresting castles thresh
  In fullgrown thickness every May.
  Last year is dead, they seem to say,
  Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
  
  2 June 1967.

• Epitaph, by Merrit Malloy

  When I die

  Give what’s left of me away

  To children

  And old men that wait to die.

  And if you need to cry,

  Cry for your brother

  Walking the street beside you.

  And when you need me,

  Put your arms

  Around anyone

  And give them

  What you need to give to me.

  I want to leave you something,

  Something better

  Than words

  Or sounds.

  Look for me

  In the people I’ve known

  Or loved,

  And if you cannot give me away,

  At least let me live on in your eyes

  And not on your mind.

  You can love me most

  By letting

  Hands touch hands,

  By letting

  Bodies touch bodies,

  And by letting go

  Of children

  That need to be free.

  Love doesn’t die,

  People do.

  So, when all that’s left of me

  Is love,

  Give me away.

  I’ll see you at home

  In the earth.

  This poem is included in the Mishkan T'filah, a prayer book used by Reform Jewish congregations.

• How Could I Have Known I Would Need To Remember Your Laughter, by Lauren K. Alleyne

  the way it ricocheted—a boomerang flung

  from your throat, stilling the breathless air.

  How you were luminous in it. Your smile. Your hair

  tossed back, flaming. Everyone around you aglow.

  How I wanted to live in it those times it ignited us

  into giggles, doubling us over aching and unmoored

  for precious minutes from our twin scars—

  the thorned secrets our tongues learned too well

  to carry. It is impossible to imagine you gone,

  dear one, your laugh lost to some silence I can’t breach,

  from which you will not return.

  for Fay Botham (May 31, 1968–January 10, 2021)

  Copyright © 2022 by Lauren K. Alleyne. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 6, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

• Death Is Nothing At All, by Canon Henry Scott-Holland

  Death is nothing at all.

  It does not count.

  I have only slipped away into the next room.

  Nothing has happened.

  Everything remains exactly as it was.

  I am I, and you are you,

  and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.

  Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

  Call me by the old familiar name.

  Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.

  Put no difference into your tone.

  Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

  Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.

  Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

  Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.

  Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

  Life means all that it ever meant.

  It is the same as it ever was.

  There is absolute and unbroken continuity.

  What is this death but a negligible accident?

  Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?

  I am but waiting for you, for an interval,

  somewhere very near,

  just round the corner.

  All is well.

  Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.

  One brief moment and all will be as it was before.

  How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

  by Canon Henry Scott-Holland, 1847-1918, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral

  From ‘The King of Terrors’, a sermon on death delivered in St Paul’s Cathedral on Whitsunday 1910, while the body of King Edward VII was lying in state at Westminster: published in Facts of the Faith, 1919.

• Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In, by Raymond Carver

  You simply go out and shut the door

  without thinking. And when you look back

  at what you’ve done

  it’s too late. If this sounds

  like the story of life, okay.

  It was raining. The neighbors who had

  a key were away. I tried and tried

  the lower windows. Stared

  inside at the sofa, plants, the table

  and chairs, the stereo set-up.

  My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me

  on the glass-topped table, and my heart

  went out to them. I said, Hello, friends,

  or something like that. After all,

  this wasn’t so bad.

  Worst things had happened. This

  was even a little funny. I found the ladder.

  Took that and leaned it against the house.

  Then climbed in the rain to the deck,

  swung myself over the railing

  and tried the door. Which was locked,

  of course. But I looked in just the same

  at my desk, some papers, and my chair.

  This was the window on the other side

  of the desk where I’d raise my eyes

  and stare out when I sat at that desk.

  This is not like downstairs, I thought.

  This is something else.

  And it was something to look in like that, unseen,

  from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.

  I don’t even think I can talk about it.

  I brought my face close to the glass

  and imagined myself inside,

  sitting at the desk. Looking up

  from my work now and again.

  Thinking about some other place

  and some other time.

  The people I had loved then.

  I stood there for a minute in the rain.

  Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.

  Even though a wave of grief passed through me.

  Even though I felt violently ashamed

  of the injury I’d done back then.

  I bashed that beautiful window.

  And stepped back in.

  From Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (Vintage Books)

• I Measure Every Grief I Meet, by Emily Dickinson

  I measure every Grief I meet

  With narrow, probing, eyes –

  I wonder if It weighs like Mine –

  Or has an Easier size.

  I wonder if They bore it long –

  Or did it just begin –

  I could not tell the Date of Mine –

  It feels so old a pain –

  I wonder if it hurts to live –

  And if They have to try –

  And whether – could They choose between –

  It would not be – to die –

  I note that Some – gone patient long –

  At length, renew their smile –

  An imitation of a Light

  That has so little Oil –

  I wonder if when Years have piled –

  Some Thousands – on the Harm –

  That hurt them early – such a lapse

  Could give them any Balm –

  Or would they go on aching still

  Through Centuries of Nerve –

  Enlightened to a larger Pain –

  In Contrast with the Love –

  The Grieved – are many – I am told –

  There is the various Cause –

  Death – is but one – and comes but once –

  And only nails the eyes –

  There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –

  A sort they call "Despair" –

  There's Banishment from native Eyes –

  In sight of Native Air –

  And though I may not guess the kind –

  Correctly – yet to me

  A piercing Comfort it affords

  In passing Calvary –

  To note the fashions – of the Cross –

  And how they're mostly worn –

  Still fascinated to presume

  That Some – are like my own –

  The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

• Singing Funeral, by Fei Hernandez

  I’ve avoided opening my throat in fear the dead would rise, walk out of me, leave me emptier after their fleeting, and still get deported back into the abyss they climbed from. I don’t think they hunger me. They want to abandon and find a soft rock to lay their head on, a voice, an empty water jug, a song, the striking pain of a windless and deserted desert or a revolver or drugs or gang affiliations. Instead I hoax them to sit perched, their black wings all slick and crow-like while I drag the weight of Mexican unsung mourning in choir. Now I have someone to blame. My brother isn’t coming back from the dead and I won’t fix my scale. The tone will always be off, a crooked meteor slicing what’s left of the sky. Songs will remain unsung, the diaphragm, a cheap staircase, not even lullabies can squeeze out, my voice box sealed, a better state line than the Mexican-American border. This time mami won’t become one million doves in the driver seat while she sings to Jenni Rivera as we drive through the sandstorm. Instead she hardens, tells me of the desert roses tumbling across the desert, how just like us they have razor sharp petals as armor on their body from tumbling aimlessly for years. Memory still doesn’t strike a guitar string, the tíos are turning in their grave, while abuelita twists her mouth so we don’t see her teethless. We all have this disease, a black dove chewing on its feathers inside of a country inside us, trapped in the cave of us, we rage or corridos Chihuahuenses or a dying ensemble, but even if the song kills me I won’t set it free. It’s obvious I must avoid the eulogy that comes after talking about my brother’s death because it’ll haunt me, his death, it will follow me and take me too, and I want to sleep tonight.

  Copyright © 2022 by féi hernandez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 18, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

• Greensickness, by Laurel Chen

  After Gwendolyn Brooks

  My wild grief didn’t know where to end.

  Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied.

  Whole swaths of green swallowed the light.

  All around me, the field was growing. I grew out

  My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face.

  Even in the greenest depths, I crouched

  Towards the light. That summer, everything grew

  So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green.

  Wildest grief grew inside out.

  I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming

  In every crevice of my palms.

  I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it

  There: A salt wind lifted

  The hair from my neck.

  At the edge of every green lies an ocean.

  When I saw that blue, I knew then:

  This world will end.

  Grief is not the only geography I know.

  Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness,

  Come spring. Every empire will fall:

  I must believe this. I felt it

  Somewhere in the field: my ancestors

  Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon.

  No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

  If grief is love with nowhere to go, then

  Oh, I’ve loved so immensely.

  That summer, everything I touched

  Was green. All bruises will fade

  From green and blue to skin.

  Let me grow through this green

  And not drown in it.

  Let me be lawless and beloved,

  Ungovernable and unafraid.

  Let me be brave enough to live here.

  Let me be precise in my actions.

  Let me feel hurt.

  I know I can heal.

  Let me try again—again and again.

  Copyright © 2022 by Laurel Chen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 21, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

• Heartbeats, by Melvin Dixon

  Work out. Ten laps.

  Chin ups. Look good.

  Steam room. Dress warm.

  Call home. Fresh air.

  Eat right. Rest well.

  Sweetheart. Safe sex.

  Sore throat. Long flu.

  Hard nodes. Beware.

  Test blood. Count cells.

  Reds thin. Whites low.

  Dress warm. Eat well.

  Short breath. Fatigue.

  Night sweats. Dry cough.

  Loose stools. Weight loss.

  Get mad. Fight back.

  Call home. Rest well.

  Don’t cry. Take charge.

  No sex. Eat right.

  Call home. Talk slow.

  Chin up. No air.

  Arms wide. Nodes hard.

  Cough dry. Hold on.

  Mouth wide. Drink this.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  No air. Breathe in.

  Breathe in. No air.

  Black out. White rooms.

  Head hot. Feet cold.

  No work. Eat right.

  CAT scan. Chin up.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  No air. No air.

  Thin blood. Sore lungs.

  Mouth dry. Mind gone.

  Six months? Three weeks?

  Can’t eat. No air.

  Today? Tonight?

  It waits. For me.

  Sweet heart. Don’t stop.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  "Heartbeats" from Love's Instruments (Tia Chucha Press, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Melvin Dixon.

• Description Of Symptoms, by Allison Benis White

  Now my hands buried

  in my hair, resting on piano keys

  in the back of my head.

  This is the music I am playing

  through my mind: a dark room singing

  a song that will not have children.

  *

  Lying on the floor tonight, snowflakes

  cut from paper laid over my eyes, a hand

  carved from wood laid over my mouth.

  If the truth is the thing you must not say,

  I will speak for the vase now

  as it falls: it is better never

  to be at all.

  *

  A hand on the back of my head

  made of glass, my love, my eyes,

  filled with wire, life. Once

  I watched a bird’s shadow cross a field

  in the wind: a black hat that could not stop

  tumbling. My eyes are sore

  from seeing, my lips from speaking.

  *

  How a ribbon curls when pulled

  across a scissor’s blade, I am practicing

  transformation, pain. How the dark hair

  of imagination, uncut, grows down

  to the floor. What is left

  but to make a world, a war?

  *

  Or a landscape in which to stay alive

  (ghost flower/house of breath). Another wish: language

  drilled through ice, through my life.

  If grief is love with nowhere to go, this is

  my mouth turning into snow.

  This is somewhere.

  Copyright © 2023 by Allison Benis White. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 20, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

• Dear Lovely Death, by Langston Hughes

  Dear lovely Death

  That taketh all things under wing —

  Never to kill —

  Only to change

  Into some other thing

  This suffering flesh,

  To make it either more or less,

  But not again the same —

  Dear lovely Death,

  Change is thy other name.

  The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, (Poems 1921-1930, p. 127), Edited by Arnold Rampersad, and David Roessel, Vintage Books, New York, NY, 1994]

• When Great Trees Fall, by Maya Angelou

  When great trees fall,

  rocks on distant hills shudder,

  lions hunker down

  in tall grasses,

  and even elephants

  lumber after safety.

  When great trees fall

  in forests,

  small things recoil into silence,

  their senses

  eroded beyond fear.

  When great souls die,

  the air around us becomes

  light, rare, sterile.

  We breathe, briefly.

  Our eyes, briefly,

  see with

  a hurtful clarity.

  Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

  examines,

  gnaws on kind words

  unsaid,

  promised walks

  never taken.

  Great souls die and

  our reality, bound to

  them, takes leave of us.

  Our souls,

  dependent upon their

  nurture,

  now shrink, wizened.

  Our minds, formed

  and informed by their

  radiance, fall away.

  We are not so much maddened

  as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of

  dark, cold

  caves.

  And when great souls die,

  after a period peace blooms,

  slowly and always

  irregularly. Spaces fill

  with a kind of

  soothing electric vibration.

  Our senses, restored, never

  to be the same, whisper to us.

  They existed. They existed.

  We can be. Be and be

  better. For they existed.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

• Poem for a Suicide, by Matthew Zapruder

  The yellow flowers on the grave

  make an arch, they lie

  on a black stone that lies on the ground

  like a black door that will always

  remain closed down into the earth,

  into it is etched the name

  of a great poet who believed

  he had nothing more to say,

  he threw himself into literal water

  and everyone has done their mourning

  and been mourned over, and we all

  went on with our shopping,

  I stare at this photograph of that grave

  and think you died like him,

  like all the others,

  and the yellow flowers

  seem angry, they seem to want to refuse

  to be placed anywhere but in a vase

  next to the living, someday

  all of us will have our names

  etched where we cannot read them,

  she who sealed her envelopes

  full of poems about doubt with flowers

  called it her “granite lip,” I want mine

  to say Lucky Life, and what would

  a perfect elegy do? place the flowers

  back in the ground? take me

  where I can watch him sit eternally

  dreaming over his typewriter?

  then, at last, will I finally unlearn

  everything? and I admit that yes,

  while I could never leave

  everyone, here at last

  I understand these yellow flowers,

  the names, the black door

  he held open

  and you walked through.

  Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Zapruder. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

• Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep, by Clare Harner

  Do not stand at my grave and weep

  I am not there. I do not sleep.

  I am a thousand winds that blow.

  I am the diamond glints on snow.

  I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

  I am the gentle autumn rain.

  When you awaken in the morning's hush

  I am the swift uplifting rush

  Of quiet birds in circled flight.

  I am the soft stars that shine at night.

  Do not stand at my grave and cry;

  I am not there. I did not die.

  The Gypsy, December 1934

• Going Through The Old Photos, by Michael Rosen

  Me, my dad, and my brother, we were looking through the old photos: pictures of my dad with a broken leg, and my mum with big flappy shorts, and me on a tricycle. When we got to one of my mum with a baby on her knee, and I go: "Is that me? Or Brian, my brother?" And my dad says: "Let's have a look." "Oh. Hmm... it isn't you or Brian." he says. "It's Alan. He died. He would have been two years younger than Brian, and two years older than you. Hmm. He was a lovely baby." "How did he die?" "Whooping cough." I was away at the time. He coughed himself to death in Connie's arms. The terrible thing is, it wouldn't happen today, but it was during the war, you see. And they didn't have the medicines. Hmm. That must be the only photo of him that we've got. Me and Brian looked at the photo. We couldn't say anything.

  It was the first time we'd ever heard about Alan. For a moment I felt ashamed, like as if I'd done something wrong. I looked at the baby trying to work out who he looked like. I wanted to know what another brother would have been like. No way of saying, and mum looked so happy. Of course, she didn't know when they took the photo that he would die, did she? Funny thing is, though my father mentioned it every now and then over the years, mum - never. And he never said anything in front of her about it, and we never let on that we knew. What I've never figured out was whether her silence, was because she was more upset about it than my dad, or less.

  From Quick Let’s Get Out of Here! (Deutsch, 1983/ Puffin, 1985), © Michael Rosen 1983.

• Crossing the Bar, by Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

  And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I put out to sea,

  
  But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

  Too full for sound and foam,

  When that which drew from out the boundless deep

  Turns again home.

  
  Twilight and evening bell,

  And after that the dark!

  And may there be no sadness of farewell,

  When I embark;

  
  For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

  The flood may bear me far,

  I hope to see my Pilot face to face

  When I have crost the bar.

  First published in 1889.

• Milk, by Julia B Levine

  Even in the dream, it is long past the possible

  when I uncover my breast and hold the baby

  close enough to drink. How helpless he is

  to resist, helpless as the mind in a deep dream

  to stop and change direction. Though, on waking,

  the mind remembers our grown daughters

  and the room where we sleep, and beyond it,

  the outside made white with smoke from a fire.

  Remembers, yesterday’s eerie milk-gold light

  we walked through, and stopped a moment

  beside a baby fox. In the road, wasps lighted on his skull,

  their black bodies beading his torn-apart torso,

  while gnats and flies sipped at the glistening.

  And the work of those winged things seemed a fire

  chewing through manzanita and alder,

  Douglas fir and cedar, the maggots and flies

  and wasps carrying the forest out of the fox,

  the way the fire carried the forest out of the world.

  You asked then if a mother fox could feel sadness.

  And because last night my mind had used a memory

  of my body to deceive me, had pressed my son close,

  believing if he drank, I could keep him,

  I want to believe the dead fox was a twin,

  a mirror image following yet behind the vixen,

  the way a dream can shadow the mind,

  and the mind helpless against our stillborn son

  that lives inside my dreams and runs silent

  as a wild fox behind our daughters. It was dusk

  when we turned to go, so quickly the wasps and flies

  rose together, as if the black-and-yellow robes

  they carried through the milk-gold light had slipped

  from the death they had just been covering. All of us helpless

  against the beauty of the hurt world as it burns.
  
  Copyright © 2022 by Julia B. Levine. This poem appeared in Southern Review, 2022.

• Good Bones, by Maggie Smith

  Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

  Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

  in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

  a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

  I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

  fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

  estimate, though I keep this from my children.

  For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

  For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

  sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

  is at least half terrible, and for every kind

  stranger, there is one who would break you,

  though I keep this from my children. I am trying

  to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

  walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

  about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

  right? You could make this place beautiful.

  This poem originally appeared in Waxwing, Issue 10, in June 2016

• The Happy Couple - Death Poem, by Alysia Harris

  There will come a day when the fear of death

  Will be the favourite joke passed amongst corpses

  And they are already laughing

  My love please don’t be afraid

  But there will come a day when field mice play

  In our empty sockets. When our bones

  Become homes for living creatures

  Other than our egos

  And when time jostles our skeletons

  Out of the composition that is me

  And you

  And will write with us love letters that spell…

  I owe you Eternity

  If we believe in life after death

  Then I often wonder why

  We assume the dead like coffins

  When people were never meant to live in boxes

  So I pray that our children have the good sense

  To leave us a little wiggle room

  Leave us exposed like stray dogs in a thunderstorm

  And I will hear the breeze but not know it as the breeze

  And I will feel the rain but not know it as the rain

  And I will behold the sky but not know it as the sky

  Instead I will hear the breeze and think it’s your love

  Returned into the hearth of my ears

  And I will feel the rain and think it is the pinprick of your kiss

  And when the rain is tender I will know that something has softened you

  And when the rain is violent I will know something has shaken you

  And in this newfound understanding without eyes or ears…or hands…or lips

  Our bare bones will make love in the dirt never knowing our nakedness

  Imagine!

  The wind coursing through a calligraphy of weeds.

  In our disrepair we have grown garden of ourselves

  Sprouts of curious grass shooting from my eye sockets

  Our knuckles, hard, smooth skipping stones

  Meant for child’s play

  And the devilish sun picking its way through your missing teeth

  And neither one of us can keep from smiling these days

  And the days go unnoticed

  And the nights go unslept

  And we talk with our souls

  Through the holes in our ribs

  Where organs once sat

  Imagine!

  Your skull and mine reduced to grins

  Both washed clean of our skins

  And our sins

  Growing young again

  Forgetting why we ever wrinkled

  Why we ever furrowed our brows

  With the plow of anger become

  Become dust with me

  Insignificant in every way

  I will love you

  Even after your marrow has become a whisper

  In your bones

  Nothing but a snickering of gravel

  Let us soak in these spaces

  Our shadows left behind

  Your skeleton laced with mine

  And I will tie your soles to my ankles

  And know what it’s like to step into a dream

  And you will try on my backbone

  And see how bad it hurt

  The day you said you were calling it quits

  I don’t remember why you left

  Or why you came back

  I don’t know how many years have passed

  Not really sure years passed at all

  All I know is the rain falls you kiss me

  Like a rainfall

  The sun it bleaches us clear and every day is a romance

  All this to say

  All this to say we are already laughing

  There is a wedding of earthworms and pebbles waiting

  When our tuxedo skeletons no longer fit

  There is a place for our faces to lie

  Planted beside forever smiling

  There is the place where we can be still

  And in love

  There exists a place where we can

  Still be in love

  Just two gentle skulls.

  Watch performance here.