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-For Mary by Rebekah J. Marshall 1/20/19

Goodbye, my dear friend.

“The earth has arranged her skirts

and taken you back so tenderly.”

I know you have “vanished

into something better-”

“the dark hug of time.”

What is it like “after the last day?”

“Did you float into the sky?”

I know “you never intended

to be in this world,”

yet you still got on with

“building the universe.”

“Everything dies at last and too soon,’

so I will bathe in the

“moon’s bone-white eye”

while whispering

“prayers made of grass”

until “all the locks click open.”

No matter how “humble the effort,”

I will “move my grains on a hillside”

one by one if need be

for “neither power nor powerlessness

will have me entirely”

and “I am willing to be dazzled.”

Yes, “my spirit carries within it the thorn,”

but I “keep on trudging.”

And every so often

“green leaves emerge from the tips of my fingers.”

A “fox on his feet of silk” found

“a bride married to amazement.”

I “have changed my life,”

“announced my place in the family of things,”

and “invented the dance with the wind,” for

“death is a little way away from everywhere.”

This is the very reason that

“every morning the world is created.”

Thank you for living

“your one wild and precious life.”

I will “remember your beloved name”

until I am “washed out of my bones”

because “death isn’t darkness after all,

but so much light wrapping itself around us.”