(no subject)

[rosaw]

Thank you all for your kind words and support in the past week. I have a couple of poems that were a comfort I want to share here.

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary
Than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps, we would still live no other way.
We cherish memory as the only certain immortality never fully
Understanding the necessary pain....
The Once Again Prince, Irving Townsend


Dignity

Near the end of your life you regard
me with a gaze clear and lucid
saying simply, I am, I will not be.

How foolish to imagine animals
don't comprehend death. Old
cats study it like a recalcitrant mouse.

You seek out warmth for your bones
close now to the sleek coat
that barely wraps them,

little knobs of spine, the jut
of hip bones, the skull
my fingers lightly caress.

Sometimes in the night you cry:
a deep piteous banner of gone
desire and current sorrow,

the fear that the night is long
and hungry and you pace
among its teeth feeling time

slipping through you cold and
slick. If I rise and fetch you back
to bed, you curl against me purring

able to grasp pleasure by the nape
even inside pain. Your austere
dying opens its rose of ash.

Colors Run Through Us, Marge Piercy