On My Death

To the gravedigger, dear sir let the ivy grow and the rain fall in the stele As a flower fall from Eden, I hear the angels sing While I slightly twist and turn in the God’s acre, so deep. Erstwhile a soldier of war, till kingdom come, I shall remain as such. I am not a hero, just a son who never returned in foreign lands and in an alien time I sleep through days and nights as the war ends and victory levitates I do not celebrate Just mourn over broken promises. As in the early morning there on the sepulcher A blackbird sits and cries Down to the pavements and to the catacombs it caws and caws in despair to wake the dead. And as the roads that lay out of the graveyard And the thousand miles journey That follows, shall never be trodden. As the church bells ring And the crowd that follows shall pray for me, How as of upon a very fair time and of now I ask my mother To take me to church and lay me down at divinity A girl and her lover meets in the burial ground And they speak of their love in secret Hush now , the dead are listening Of your tryst in the graveyard Of every night and the sweet parting kiss, We wonder, we covet and remember our own despair When we hear your love song in that strange tongue. I weep in the depths for my own tattered love Where my lover still weeps by the hillside Or has she moved on. the first drop of rain, or the first piece of snow, The first beam of light of the first cover of darkness Strike my bed first And while the sun keeps the moss away I wait and wait, not for my widow Nor for some candles in a dark stormy night I do not wish for flowers, for I cannot smell them To days past and nights darkened by All I wish and could wish lay by a thousand miles In distance, homeward bound. Since I cannot follow, and never make haste I shall lay here quietly, without a sound And dream of the seas and oceans and of clouds passing by. 4/4/15