Meditation in White

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lily

Meditation in White (Lilies)

Clouds pass my high window quickly, abandoning the blue.
Indefinite mass, indeterminate, impersonal

as only intimates may know.
Though you lay there, nothing remained in the bed.

Which is the blank page’s gift, the monotone
or a suggestion of mist and stripped bones.

The nurse marked the passage with pen on paper.
Renewal, departure. A rising.

I accept the ash of suffering
as I accept our destination, the morning

and its offerings, with you in synthesis,
complete and empty, shaded in contrast,

wilting, as another opens. Laughter eases the way.

***

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This first appeared in Shadowtrain.

33 thoughts on “Meditation in White”

  8. The blank page is a gift indeed. And I don’t know about you, but somehow to me, lilies — even in the (non)color of mourning — always seem to be laughing. How else to go on?

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  10. This tugs — “suggestion of mist and bleached bones”, “renewal, departure. A rising.” I can only imagine what stimulated its creation, but it struck personal chords. Some events can’t be entirely reconciled. Thank you for the reminder to laugh. 🙂

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  11. Most of the poems in this series deal with loss of one sort or another. The laughter line came about from a thought about Tibetan sky burials – the priests, while dismembering corpses and pulverizing the bones, sing and laugh to ease the burdens of the departed, and surely their own.

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