More on: death

You carry our son in a locket
you hang around your neck

each morning, a way, I guess,
of carrying what isn’t and what is

In my mind,

my son cannot be nowhere, and yet I cannot imagine
where he is, except here, growing older inside me.”

I remember you in your final atonement, how calm you were. 
Though you couldn’t tell me, you understood the names hidden in the dusk. 

That was terrorism,
she says. I know evil.

. . . I love her and how do we

explain her?

I hear these words in your voice no matter who says them, in the well-water smell of the basement, by the artificial tree you and she would one day put a sheet over, so you never had to take it down or put it up again.

Because we die, we all die, and the oak lives, 
those imagined rings like so many glasses 

If there is
a God, is there such a thing

as holy regret for what he’s made?

Why pray for the dead if not for this,
for God’s speed on their journey, home,
beneath the burden of the proof they bear.

Suffering, I once believed, was a human privilege,
but in that moment I watched as God
died, as God witnessed.

The dead who walk the streets might be a relic of the past, something your Sicilian grandma might tell you about, but the Sanctuary of the Souls of the Beheaded is very much alive.