A thirteenth moon rose and set.
We communed more intimately a day later from a cemetery I knew as a child.
Burial ground of those taken by wars I had learned about in school.
A place I tried smoking cigarettes and fitting in with a mean girl.
A place my sister tells me we entertained our younger selves competing to find the oldest dates in history etched in stone.
I couldn’t know what death meant then.
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Spring scents and numerous blessings by way of memory and meaning in just two days.
Geese. Irises a color I had never seen. An old stone home I didn’t know I had missed.
Two burial grounds in one day.
I held light within dark between long arms.
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Jewish text from the mouth of a favorite rabbi, who charms my sensibilities with his profanities poetic.
A bridge merging science and spirit mends more of the wounds I so diligently care for.
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Distinction between tears and sorrow make for truer bone drenched living.
Amen.
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They, as in a tradition I was raised, offer ritual for how to both grieve and honor life.
Amen.
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Expansion. Contraction. Like lungs. Heart. Cells.
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Nine piece puzzle unites a configuration of those with some relation as we believed it could be solved.
My belief is that we could part at the right time because we all knew what was possible.
Often the necessity to tend to life, and the made up necessities of life, requires that we find ways to end things.
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The only answer can be love. A reiteration.
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Mother, most graceful widow, wished for a photo.
Perhaps she was right to fear those of us left needed to be captured in some way.
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Solace found in the imagining of a body turning back into the Earth.
Dissolution birthing a return to that from which we came.
And yet, the unchanged image of a form permits passage between alone and together.
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A laying: like healing hands, like a supple animal under a canopy of sky, like a story I may put down. There is an orientation to what is alright.