3 Lost Child

Suicide

Perhaps it came from falling up the sky.
If so, it wasn’t falling,
but a reach
for life and space for breathing. 
Like a plant,
he stretched his hand to light. 
His grasp fell short.

Or there’s perhaps a story
we don’t know
that caused his mind to wobble out of plumb
and spin for breathless moments
until the drums
of waver and imbalance
drove him down.

So much we’ll never know,
and so repeat guessed reasons,
useless questions,
trace his climb from nothing back to nothing,
sit to breathe
and when recovered rise,
like time move on.

Preparation

The lost child is a wound that does not close,
it seeps, but never fills.
Flesh does not heal, anneals perhaps a while,
still love leaks out.

The emptiness, another name for grief
and time’s untimely temper,
builds up like snow in winter,
wiping tracks.

There is no more reprieve, no going back,
no argument to try, no untried tack.
There is no lack of truth.
Death is a fact.

The Funeral

The sole surviving children still rely
on strength of hand and eye
to make things right.

They are, at once, the living who take care.
Each child grows older faster. 

This, they think,
is what it means to love:  your options shrink.