Somebody died yesterday.
Then another and another.
I saw their souls sitting on the prairie,
wrapped in blankets and sun.
Should I speak to them now, or wait?

Stay calm. Go from bed to pen and back.
The paper’s there for conversation.
Ink on pages will outlast me,
when persons become ghosts
and a whole world of anima hangs above
like webs on a chandelier.

It is the living who pray to strange gods,
who make laws and break them
in our short, foolish lives,
who worry when the roof leaks, a cellar floods,
who torture each other, cage children,
who keep walking our daily rounds, thinking of youth,
waiting to slide into the dark.
Who will mourn us, someone or no one?

I will wrap myself in wind.
I will pull the needles from my arms,
the tubes from my mouth. My skin, tissue-thin,
will be the memory of veins in a leaf.
My fragility will bloom with wordless affection
for the living and the dead. My bones
will disintegrate, their ashes rise to meet
my ancestors on some mountain or cityscape,
their dust in the skyscrapers they built,
stone on stone.

– Previously published in Poetry Salzburg