Something Greater
I’ve never been to a graveyard.
All of my family has been cremated
And the smoke falls up to choke a cloudless sky
And ashes drift down to smother the earth.
I’ve never been to a graveyard.
but I imagine they are
slow
and soft
and still.
like the sound of an autumn leaf touching down on packed dirt.
All of my family has been cremated
their pictures lie fading by the windowsills.
They say, ‘See:
This is your great-grandmother,
See her mother,
and her mother
and her mother.
Live like the legacy that you are.’
Life began in death.
Before, those first steps,
waddling from the mud,
Small, stubby creatures
with watery eyes
and gaping jaws
and fluttering gills.
Once, the earth had us.
The ocean enveloped us and pulled us down,
dipping its dim teeth through soft flesh
and gripping tightly.
Then, later,
We stood apart from the earth and that suffocating ocean,
Placed sheets of
metal
and wood
and rock
between us and the dirt
And proclaimed ourselves above.
We departed our home for the sky.
Yet, we return to that earth.
Rappelled down slowly
to allow the earth to swallow us,
where, churning, it pulls us down to that place
Among the stiff frozen roots and the blind crawling things
from which we escaped.
Better to burn,
than to surrender what has known the light of this world
to blindness once more.
The earth had us once, and it never will again.
I’ve never been to a graveyard.
And I will never go.
For to allow that to be the final resting place of man:
that place where the dead lie idle and smouldering
With slack jaws
and dry, crumbling eyes
Until they melt into the earth—
Would forever be a insult
to the dignity that we have created.
For I died as a man, yet lived as something greater—
This life took me too far and too deep
for me to never learn to fly.