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Looking for answers in the 21st Century
--Word Press photo by Stan Myer
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Because I was twice near death
You asked, my wounded, distant friend,
What's on the other side?
I wish I had better news.
I wish I could tell you of aurochs and angels,
Of music in major keys and rose-colored light,
Of joy everlasting among those we love,
But all I saw was nothing,
Gray as an old TV with a bright point vanishing,
Not even a test pattern, if you remember.
I wish for us both I saw something more,
No balm for our hearts when we've both lost a child.
My daughter, near the end, stared toward the ceiling, aghast,
At what? Her focus far beyond Manhattan,
Perhaps it was the fentanyl, perhaps she saw the truth,
But in the same spiral decades earlier, I saw nothing.
First there was the fear of the dark,
then there was the darkness.
First there was purgatory imagined,
then there was the end of imagination.
First hallucination,
then the blank screen.
Their souls have departed.
Thinking, alone with our thoughts,
The poverty of waking life, here where it nears the eternal.
You who are apart, I who am apart,
We have suffered enough to fool ourselves with happiness,
Nothing, but happiness,
As vulnerable as the dread from which it comes.
for D.C.
—with four lines by Caroline Forsche.
