"The
Constant PallBearer"
Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
June 25, 2005 7:25 a.m. pdt
Mom and Dad, I miss you
both immensely
Even though I fear I forget your faces oftentimes
The shiny white walls of the hospitals never glistened for me
And when they put your bodies in the ground
The walls could fade and burnish, lose thier lustre,
And for me this was a revelation of respect
I will talk to you in silence, free from those hospital walls
Free from the sickening alcohol smells
And the overweight nursing staff with their
pinned up hosiery
Plodding through the halls with the shiny walls
Those are not missed at all
Tom, I never even gave you
the respect
of visiting you in those halls of dissolution
The sights and sounds and smells of sickness
didn't touch me as we telephoned our concerns
And seeming lack, as we knew you
would never walk again, but we didn' t know
you would never breathe either.
The casket was incredibly heavy
holding your girth and weight,
which, now, has gone the way of the worm
leaving nothing but raucous memories
weaving between the wormwood
Bob, I will never forget
you, lying, naked on the bathroom floor
No hospitals for you, just another
evening trip to the shi**er, the last trip.
Joel banging on the door
needing to take a pi** and you wouldn't open it
because your life was gone,
and no matter what we did
you wouldn't be revived.
47 seems like such a young age to leave
Cutedog, I still grieve
for your passing,
The disease never showed itself on your website
Only happy bunnies and blooming flowers
Only your words of comfort hovering
over someone's perceived sadness
But never yours
The day I "visited" you on the internet
and the website remained in limbo
for a while
but you weren't around to update anymore
It had been a while since you had left
But I didn't know
And now I do
Dan you were so full of
life
The 'Crazy Canuck' with a beer and a joint
Still living in the same neighborhood in Toronto
where you grew up.
Working at the same elementary school
you attended
You traveled, you had many friends,
You always came back to SoCal to see us
and we had such grand times
Until that day last year Joel called and
you couldn't answer becuase that pneumonia
stifled your presence forever
and you weren't even 50
We still can't believe you are gone
The souls of humankind gather
together in eternity
On Earth we become pallbearers for existence
We pray, we plead, we shed a tear, and we go on
for a while at least, until it is our time.
We command soulgrief and we carry the
weight of time's coffin until we lay down for the last time
The burden of existence
is not carried by the dead
They are free of all bothersome questioning
Until that time as we are released from our burden
we will worry, we will mourn, and we will remember
and at some future time, perhaps in a decade
perhaps in a couple of minutes,
we will join Mom, Dad, Tom, Bob, and Dan in eternity
And we might be mourned until
our mourners join us as well
in the place nobody knows exists
but everybody will experience
at the time that someone else
becomes the constant pallbearer
Poetry
2005
