“Life Goes On”
“Life Goes On”
*
That’s what Dad always said,
Remember, Tony?
My dear swarthy brother,
dark of skin,
warm of heart,
we shared the same hazel eyes,
a mix of Mom’s Sicilian brown
and Dad’s brilliant blue.
We lived separate lives,
you in Michigan,
me in New York,
you with three adopted children,
me, childless with Ko-ko and Tom.
You weren’t supposed to DIE!
You and I were to be
fellow way-farers
on the road through life.
We were to live parallel lives
and you were supposed to die
when you were old and feeble,
not middle-aged,
in a tortured death!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
*
“Life goes on.”
*
Today I light a candle
on my altar to you and Mom and Dad
and send you Reiki
like I did while you fought for your life
for two years
after a prognosis of two months.
My heart aches
on this second anniversary
of your death.
*
“Life goes on.”
*
Your wife, your children, and I
cry out for you
but you have moved on to some higher form.
You paid your karmic dues,
with your diagnosis, cancer.
Long before,
you always told me
not to worry,
that you’d live long because
only the good die young.
But you were too good
and you died far too young
and I live on in my little, reclusive life,
Ko-ko no longer here,
just me and Tom.
I should have been the one to go
but the good die young.
*
“And life goes on.”
Dropping Dead
Jack Kornfield reads a poem on the finiteness of life while talking about meditation practice (3:26 min.)
The Light Beings
In the freshness of the forest
I like to think
there are beings of light
especially after a rain
dancing in the green scented air
some call them aberrations
of the digital age
but I think them not unlike
the perception
of fleeting flecks of light
seen against an empty sky
I marvelled at as a child
and was flatly told they were floaters on the eye
floaters they are not
rather they speak to me still
decades later
in hushed whispers
of the mystifying mystery
of the air we breathe
and the light we see
everyday without thinking.
MOONSIDE 