OUR KIND

see each face as a landing field of time
and each head of hair as a map of shifting wind.
Our kind has been told it’s best to live each day
as if it were our last,
but have no intimation of how or when
that last day will come.
And yet Woody, who was always so kind,
told me while relating his oncologist’s prognosis:
There’s some comfort in knowing what it is
will take me out;
as if planning a date with his own demise.
Death came in a dream to my beloved Denise
as her high school music teacher,
the mentor who had introduced her to Bach,
Copeland, Elgar.
How surprised she was then to see him
sitting beside her on the grass of Boston Common.
I never figured you to be the Angel of Death,
but he just smiled and said:
Did you think we would send you a stranger?
Our kind doesn’t see death as chess master,
nor as some cowled figure clutching his scythe
as if the industrial revolution was never a thing.
We know there is no name to which it answers,
how it only echoes these questions we feel
compelled to ask.
Our kind looks across the dark river
and imagines how strange it will be
to float, weightless,
as a body suddenly and forever
not our own.

Fred Pelka became a cancer widower on Easter Sunday, 2019.  He currently lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts. His two published poetry books can be found at:
Mata Hari’s Head is Missing | Fred Pelka | Main Street Rag
A Different Blaze | Levellers Press