Sacred Holes
Death leaves a sacred hole
where once lived a whole relationship
with both potential future
and a now more cherished past
Still seen
and heard
and smelled,
tasted and felt, sensed
and incensed
through an echoing hole of darkly bitter loss.
I would be a hypocrite
and a liar
if I were to condemn
our sons and their cherished friends
for cowardice
or craziness
for choosing to end their lives.
When government sanctioned taking of life
goes on and on and on
we call this the cost of just wars
or a death penalty
rather than a life forfeit.
Yet it is the living
who repay this price.
It could be more honest
to call these deliberate extractions
a death investment
and perpetual re-investment
of a culture not yet sure of how radically vulnerable
compassionate life could
and should
become.
Death investment repeated as long as politically expedient,
and also personally poignant
whether self or other inflicted
or something in-between.
I do not grieve his loss of future
but my own
For to grieve my own lost future,
all we might have yet become together,
is honest,
and holy
While to grieve his lost future
is to dishonor his choice
and his compulsion
to part ways
when life felt too dishonest
to bear another traumatic day.
To be born
before or after
or beside and aside one's right-felt time
and nurturing place
is already loss of future
sent through messages past
as love grows too thin and faded
lust for life descends too jaded,
loss of faith
for hope
arising futures now lost.
I would not dishonor,
too easily dismiss,
suicidal loss of life
as complete insanity
as if I could claim,
with full integrity,
that inhumane and too-patriarchal living losses
are not shy of full-grown sanity.
As this day closes,
this time and place
in tears of loss
without fanfare,
without deadly sentences
much less farewells,
I yet lack courage
of my own despair
about our future of continuing death investment
as measured by my own limits
for tolerating inane insanity,
vitriolic violence,
absurd abuse
of calling deliberate death investments a penalty
as if any life were something reasonably erased
through ultimatum fines
for having had an unfortunate birth day.
This death leaves a sacred hole
where once lived a whole relationship
of futures cast together
now gently placed
apart.
What did he see
that I have not yet felt
strongly enough
to choose to never see again?
This question changes those left behind
for the rest of our haunted days and nights.
Why him,
and not yet me,
not yet us?
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