Our Names Go With Them

(for Jerry, Patricia and Naoko)

When someone dies
Our names go with them,
Each of us a vowel
In the creation.
Paradise is a choir
Where no words are lost,
Your marriage neither
Has ended there,
As its ending has grown
Into the newest hybrid flower,
Each personal loss likewise
Composing a bouquet,
Brilliant with forget-me-nots.
All of us began as the first people
And when anyone dies
We feel briefly
We are the last.

We gathered here a year ago.
We had joined the nation’s
Inglorious list of names
Where Murder came.
Dressed like any one of us,
Murder came and took our friends
Away. And yet we gathered
Bravely holding artificial candles
And a singer reminded us
To rise up,
In spite of the age,
Rise up,
Our eyes not afraid.
Straining to hear every word
In the noise of the planes overhead,
We met as one,
Believing, in our love,
That their loss would
Teach us to fill
What is hollow here.

Each began as the first people
And when anyone dies
We feel briefly
We are the last,
But we are not.
The last, as the child knows,
Will be first since there is nothing
Last about our travel here…
And flowers fall to rise again

By Claudia Keelan
26 November 2024
Las Vegas