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Let’s go down

There was recently a death in my wife’s family. It was no-one I knew. He was close to her father, however, who now lives with us. When something like this happens, my wife will want to visit one of the Catholic churches in town, presumably to pray for the soul of the departed.

Let’s go down

Let’s go down to the masonry
that holds the high-arched doors
and in to the pews beyond them
to offer our inmost prayers.

Let’s go down to the marble font
and cross our heads with the water
as we remember with all our thoughts
one who is no longer with us.

Let’s go down to the heart of the nave
where ancients circle the altar
and bow our heads in the solemn light
that eases the restive soul.

Let’s go down to the effigies
that peer from their quiet coves
and light the vigils with incense sticks
for one who has gone before.

Let’s go down to the redbrick church,
the one where spirits dream,
and kneel at the creaky old wooden pews
to pray for the recent dead.

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Lines to My Son

My goal was to have this written for my son’s second birthday. But, although I began working on this poem with six weeks to spare, it is now about six weeks late. This mostly is due to my still learning how to manage and maximize my creative time and energy as a first time parent. Well, first the poem, then a few thoughts.

Lines to My Son

There is a stillness in your eyes
that not a lifetime could disguise,
never mind the mere two years
we’ve shared of laughter, play and tears.

My child, when you cast your smile,
I am compelled to gaze a while
on all the features of your face,
each contour radiant with grace.

I know that sometimes you will cry,
that pain and grief will make you sigh,
but in the end, I hope your share
of peace will far outweigh despair.

I hope that as you grow, a sense
of purpose—meaning—will condense
within your soul until a spring
of inspiration purls and sings.

I know that you will face arrays
of challenges throughout your days,
and sometimes with a heavy heart,
you’ll want to fold and fall apart.

But, son, I hope you’ll come to see
that what is gained too easily
is rarely valued at its worth
and offers only fleeting mirth.

I hope you’ll learn to meet with poise
each obstacle that life deploys
and overcome it with that grace
I see forever in your face.

I know one day that love may lunge
from shadows at your heart and plunge
its ancient kris between your bones
and leave you wretched, wracked with moans.

But if this end should come to pass,
I hope in time you’ll rise at last
and realize deep within your soul
that love is nurtured—not controlled.

I know that fear, with silent tread,
may one day stalk your thoughts till dread
swells acid-like within your chest
and melts all courage from your breast.

If that lean creature ever learns
your scent, I hope that you’ll discern
the way to throw it off your trail,
ensuring all its efforts fail.

I hope you’ll come to see that fear
pursues those thoughts within the sphere
of all the worst of what could be
until it mauls reality.

I hope you’ll learn to contemplate
your blessings and appreciate
the least of things that come your way,
the smallest moments of your day.

I know that sometimes loneliness
may chill you with her gelid kiss
until you crave for any fire
to burn away your dread desire.

But, son, I hope you’ll make your peace
with solitude and grant her lease
within your wide expanse of self
where she reveals one’s inner wealth.

For solitude and loneliness
are only sisters in the sense
that each reflects an attribute
of isolation, but in truth

the two are not at all the same;
one sister lights and keeps the flame
of contemplation, but her kin
instills an anguish deep within.

I know that loss will find your door,
and though you ask, entreat, implore,
he’ll barge into your private place
and carve a lasting, empty space.

I hope, despite the swells of grief
that crash across that jagged reef
of raw emotion deep inside,
you’ll find a way to bear the tide

and build a lighthouse on that shoal
whose spinning beacon may console
with brighter moments from before
you lost the ones that you adore.

I hope that you will find the strength
to mourn your losses, then at length
stand tall, gaze deep into the night,
and let acceptance fill your sight.

I hope with vibrant health you’ll live
till all your hairs turn gray and give
you such a sagely countenance
you’re loved by all with reverence.

I don’t go into writing a poem like this thinking, “This is going to be written in iambic tetrameters using an aabb end-line scheme.” For me, the pattern emerges on its own, usually in mind as I explore the opening lines and stanzas before writing anything down. Once a pattern emerges, if it emerges at all, I usually stay with it. By the end of the fourth stanza, I decided that variations on rhyme suit the end-line scheme just fine, but that I would also still attempt to use rhyme whenever possible.

There are five great difficulties explored in this poem, five challenges that I myself have faced and endured throughout the years, mostly stemming from internal issues—perhaps psychological in nature. These are giving up, feeling betrayed, anxiety, loneliness, and loss. There’s more to the poem than this, but as it has occurred to me that some my overwhelming difficulties with these personal challenges may be genetic in nature, it felt important to me to try to use this piece to pass on some of what I’ve learned about them in the hope that he will one day read and gain insight should he find himself facing similar struggles.

I have no way of knowing if I’ll live long enough to offer him such insights as those I’ve tried to express here by the time he has need of them, and so this poem. Even if I do, it may be that by the time he’s dealing with some of these struggles himself, he’d be more open to taking my thoughts into consideration from this form anyway, written when he was still a toddler.

My father was gone by the time I was 10. I have no idea what insights he may have had for me. I have no real indication that he even thought of what kind of person I might be as an adolescent or as an adult. As my son grows up, I would like him to know that I thought of him—that I thought of him as a teen, as a young man, as an adult in the middle of life, as an old man nearing the end—that I held hope in my heart every single day that he would have a good life and enjoy the bulk of his days clear to the end. It would have meant something to me if my father had such foresight. I hope this may mean something to him.

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Year of Paradox

In a strange sort of way, it’s like coming full circle—but back to what? I don’t know. 35 Julys ago, my father committed suicide. He was 45. Today I turn 45, and I find myself in an incredibly pensive state of mind. It’s not that I fear I’ll end up like him. I have a small child of my own now. I know better. It’s more like for the next year, every day will be a reminder. Every single day. Here I am, alive. Here I am, living my father’s final year—well, part of it. He didn’t make it all that far into his 45th year.

I don’t know. I’m in a state of melancholy right now. Not a state of depression, just melancholy, reflectiveness, bewilderment. Yes, he was abusive, and absolutely terrifying. Yes, he was controlling and incapable of recognizing that a child has only just arrived in life and doesn’t yet know anything. Yes, he didn’t teach and explain, but punished and terrorized. Yes, he came home only after the bars closed and woke us from our sleep and yelled, screamed, dragged us around the house and punched holes in walls. Yes, he had terrible, terrible flaws. But, he was my dad and he also showed love, tenderness and compassion. Did he think I wouldn’t care? Was he trying to hurt me? I don’t know. I really don’t know. And I know I’ll never know. Never.

But what I do know is this. For me, this is a year of paradox, like going back in time or into an alternate reality and meeting myself, my dad, or someone that looks like him or me, and stepping into an entire year of life that is not my own, not his, not anyone’s. Just a crushing and unsolvable paradox.

Year of Paradox

Now begins another year,
    and not just any other year.
  This year begins the paradox
      of all the years that came to now.

Death began this very year
    when years had barely taken root
  in crackled soils of years to come,
      now finally tapping that year of death.

Life burgeons branches into years,
    each year sprouting foliage
  that casts upon the years below
      a shadow reaching for years of life.

New years wax within the mind,
    years of rocky, raw potential,
  but even these are bound to years
      spent fearing years of nothing new.

Old years fade from memory, but
    not the year you formed a noose
  and strangled out all years to be,
      haunting through the years of old.

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The Painter

I have known Heinz since the early 2000s. We met on a poetry site and discovered we had some common interests. Though we have known one another for close to 15 years, I only recently discovered that in 1982, he lost his third child to a tragic accident. If I had learned this before having a child of my own, this may not have hit home. But as a father with a toddler of his own now, I felt tremendous, wrenching empathy for him and his story. It’s a horror every parent hopes to circumvent, period. With these heavy emotions present, I offered to write a memorial poem for his son, Benjamin, and he graciously accepted.

The Painter

for Heinz & Maureen Scheuenstuhl
in memory of Benjamin Patrick Scheuenstuhl
April 1, 1981 — September 7, 1982

I think you would have been a painter, son,
for though you only dreamed through nineteen moons,
you filled my days with color—every one—
and though a lifetime later I still mourn,
the vibrancy of all you were remains
refracted on the canvas of my soul,
reflected in the artwork of my mien.
Your strokes of laughter still adorn the holds
of memory with pigments bright and bold.
The accent of your curiosity
still decorates my thoughts, and still consoles
a grief that burns with black ferocity.
Your masterpiece, with all its wrenching hues
of joy remains enshrined within my heart.

This was an incredible challenge to write. In fact, I had written it near to completion three times before I decided to scrap the idea and try another angle entirely. In the end, I finally decided on this metaphor, explored in the form of a Spenserian sonnet, my 3rd.

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The Old Pain

My sister has commented in the past that I seem to be most drawn to reading and appreciating poetry that deals in some way with the subject of death. Perhaps. Some of my favorite, influencing poems are “Sunshine,” by Robert Service, “The Legend of the Organ Builder,” by Julia Dorr, “The Last Man,” by Thomas Campbell, and “Derelict,” by Young E. Allison. Each of these centers solidly around the subject of death in its own way.

“Sunshine” follows the final thoughts and feelings of a man whose wife has died as he himself succumbs to the same ailment that took her. “The Legend of Organ Builder” tells the story of a young man who wins fame by building a legendary organ that plays of its own accord. He arrogantly abandons his bride, believing she betrayed him and years later, when he realizes his mistake, returns home from abroad just in time to attend her funeral—during which he himself dies. “The Last Man” sets your mental vision on the remains of a dead Earth where the last living human speaks to the setting sun, knowing full well that he himself is soon to follow. “Derelict” leads you across the deck and through the holds of a derelict ship where all hands have perished during a mutiny, ostensibly triggered during a bout of drunken revelry.

So maybe it is no wonder that I find myself drawn to the subject as poet.

The Old Pain

There are too many anniversaries
that haunt the days and years as they go by
and all too many treasured memories
that stir within the old pain to a sigh.

This is the day we met, the maple leaves
that flourish by the driveway, then as now,
were sunset red and swaying in the breeze,
dancing down to dress the walk below.

We paused amid the fumes of regular,
eyes locking for a moment like a spell
was cast between the rooftops of our cars,
enchanting us into a mutual thrall.

By time this maple tree had filled its crown
with lush green cover, we assembled all
our friends and family, and made a vow
to watch as one its colors fade and swell.

The months that followed blurred to a montage,
of salient years, each moment lived in full—
then all at once the sheen of that mirage
dissolved to barren sheets of salt and soil.

The call came in the evening as the sun
sent slanting shades of light across the play
of leaves that only barely had begun
to bob out infant hands in tremulous sway.

Your splintered bones lay tubed to life support—
I just assumed long hours kept you late.
It never once occurred to me your heart
beat faintly in the latexed hands of fate.

I raced to reach your side, to touch your hand,
to seek some indication from the staff
that you would be okay, your golden band
would not become a pendant cenotaph.

But then the surgeons came who strove to hold
your spirit tethered to your heedless form.
They bade me sit—my limbs grew weak and cold
as they explained your limbs were merely warm.

The lightning storm of self behind your brows
had lost its charge—the person that you were
no longer lived within the clay, and now
the clay was all that lived, and nothing more.

For months I hovered near and watched your eyes,
your cheeks, your hands, your every subtle curve,
for any sign that you were still inside,
alive in some mysterious reserve.

But there was nothing, just the rise and fall
of ribs responding to the steady drone
of air pumped through a plastic tube to fill
your lungs that would not function on their own.

Your bones were mended, lacerations healed.
The nurses kept the pressure sores at bay.
For all of this, your soul could not be hailed
back from the stars into that quiet clay.

Insurance coverage tapped and savings gone,
there was no choice except to make the call.
The doctors came—with somber denouement
you were declared as unrecoverable.

I held your hand in both of mine. Machines
were gently disconnected. Line graphs
that danced desultory rhythms on the screens
lost all expression to an air of grief.

To think it happened only blocks from here,
close enough I might have heard the sound
of metal smashing, sirens speeding near
to lift your shattered body from the ground.

To think that as the surgeons cracked your chest
and opened up your skull to free the blood,
I watched the evening news, reclined at rest,
and snacked on crackers in a tranquil mood.

It’s fitting, then—I guess—these maple leaves
turn red as gore around the time we met,
a keen reminder that our vivid lives
lay at the mercy of an unguessed fate.

This is the day we met, a day of cheer—
or so it was a million years ago.
Your ashes dream throughout the tireless years
above the hearth—a ghostly afterglow.

Maybe I use poetry to in some way explore and seek understanding into the concept of death. Maybe the inevitable has so occupied my thoughts since I was still a toddler that it only comes naturally to me now. Maybe it is the one thing we all share, no matter what. Even if there might be some immortal among us, walking through the ages observing our histories, he too must eventually die as the sun expands and incinerates the upper mantle from of our world. Death is something every living thing has in common. It is a bond we all share. So, then, is tragedy, loss, and finding some way to live and move on.

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i found God

Photos of Aylan Kurdi, the 3 year old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Bodrum, Turkey, have haunted my thoughts for several weeks now.

i found God

cradled in the pensive palms of earth,
his head rocked slightly in the gentle surge,
caressed by waves that murmured quiet prayers;
his arms lay pale and tranquil at his side,
his legs pulled partly up as if in sleep—
perhaps he slept, but he would never wake.

eyelids lightly closed on sunken dreams,
a cherub cheek lay pressed against dark sands;
and clothes that only hours before were filled
with flames of life and curiosity
now covered only stillness like a bruise,
a shroud still dripping fathoms’ worth of rheum.

peace was on his brow, immeasurable—
such contrast to the violence of his plight;
what circumstance would bring a child here
curled sleeping cold and graying on the shore,
his shrieks of laughter silenced to a sigh
caught strangled in the throats of passersby?

this is God, i thought, in all his glory—
we praise with words his name, then turn and plunge
him flailing in the dark of angry seas
until his strength plays out and every breath
is filled with brine—and sudden quietude—
just flotsam on the altars of the deep.

yes—i found God on the beach today,
the seagulls circled high above his head
and cried their long and steady mournful calls;
the people saw him and they knelt in prayer,
hands clutching at their heaving, hollowed breasts,
all hope of penance ripped from out their souls.

If fatherhood has given me anything, it is an incredible pain in my chest at the sight of a dead, abused or impoverished child. I see the eyes of my baby son in the face of every child. I’ve heard it said that God is revealed in the face of our children, in their innocence, love and wonder. If this is true, then there is no hope of salvation for any of us, for we are all responsible and we all bear the shame of such atrocities.

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Aural Borealis

This is my 14th trisect, by far the most challenging of them all for me. First the poem, then some thoughts.

Aural Borealis

Vibration

Her voice began in a furnace where blinding flashes of light
arced through scraps of metal until they swirled in a pool
of fiery molten fluid, drawn through a running cast
to red hot beams that slowly dimmed to a charcoal gray.

Her voice remained congealed within those cold gray billets
until at last they were moved once more into the fire,
reheated to a yellow that rivaled an alpine sunrise
then rolled into burning coils of thick unfinished wire.

Her voice emerged like a mist—heavy, cold and gray—
clanging anemic pangs with every shift and shock,
until it was drawn through the eyes of a series of shrinking dies
and thinned into tensile threads of spidery, silvery hue.

Her voice awakened at last, a vivid reverberation
borne aloft on the wind to dance over rolling hills,
chasséing amid the bunchgrass, jetéing through the sagebrush,
and pirouetting through the air with flying seeds.
 

Resonance

Her frame was born in the grip of weathered, ancestral hands,
leveled against the kill, for when the shaft was flown,
the hunter’s ears were piqued by a sound that yet remained,
inspiring him to hunt for a means to play the same.

Her frame took shape in the calloused hands of inspiration,
coaxed into living form from scraps of wood and skin
by ancient artisans who notched imagination
in ornamental bows that flew but melodies.

Her frame evolved in marble halls that harbored kings,
scales and chords expanding until resistance formed
a pillar to hold against the pull of hallowed strains
and serpentine harmonic curves to relieve the same.

Her frame outgrew the very hands that gave it being,
bursting forth a will that of its own accord
would volley out barrages of elegance and meaning
on airs reechoed over undulating lands.
 

Serenade

Her breath is a wind that brushes gently through the desert,
stirring the stained glass petals of Venus’ looking glass,
exciting wild bergamot atop green towers,
and swaying deep-throated harebells lightly on their stems.

Her hum is a feathery rain that tickles arid sands,
drifting down from downy skies until all ears
relax for a moment from the wary, watchful strain
that haunts and harries every living thing through life.

Her chant is the purl of a spring high up a narrow canyon,
wild mint and licorice gathered round the edge
of small, translucent pools wherein the heavens ripple
impressionist renditions of hawk and thunderhead.

Her call is a shower of light that streams over emptiness,
distant mountaintops and nearby shrubby hills
dissolved into a silhouette that circles round
beneath the shimmering flow of relativity.

The inspiration behind this piece is two wind harps, both conceptualized and created by New Mexico resident Bill Neely. Most people know the wind harp as a wide, narrow box with a few strings upon which one may close a window in order to force air past the strings. These two harps, however, are shaped like the concert harp and larger than life. The first, referred to by its sculptor simply as “the NFO windharp,” stands 20 feet tall and weighs 1600lbs. The second, called “Tempest Song,” was commissioned by the owners of the now defunct Traditions shopping center about smack in the middle of New Mexico and weighs in at 3000lbs at 24 feet in height.

“Tempest Song” was the first of the two wind harps I chanced to visit, in 2002, actually driving out to New Mexico to see and listen to this living, musical instrument after stumbling across some information about it online. The experience was somewhat ruined by noise from the close proximity of Interstate 25. Upon returning home, I sent its creator an email along with a copy of “Aeolian Strains,” a poem inspired by my visit, and I was invited to visit the first of the two wind harps on his private property the next time I made it out that way. I made it a point to take him up on this offer two years later, spending a night under the soundboard of this 20 foot harp—a wonderful and somehow enlightening experience. It has ever since been my intention to try to write a poem worthy of that first harp, remembering that night under the stars listening to her sing.

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Wild Cherry

For over ten years now, I’ve tried to write a sakura (cherry blossom) poem every spring. Though I started this poem early in the spring when the trees were still in bloom here in the Reno area, they’ve since greened and gone to seed. As a new parent, it has been more challenging than ever for me to focus my time and energies as I would like, hence the slow writing process. Another thing I try to do every year is to complete a poem on my birthday, which I’ve managed to accomplish here.

Wild Cherry

for Joy

Each hour with you is a blossom
  on a dark wood cherry tree
bursting light from the silence
      of wood grain mystery

Each week that passes between us
  is a twig on that dark wood tree
swaying on gentle breezes
      like foam adrift on the sea

Each season we share together
  is a branch from which they grow
bright as a cloud in the darkness
      reflecting the full moon’s glow

Each year that shimmers behind us
  is a limb that holds on high
moments arrayed in a splendor
      that rivals the dawning sky

And lifting it all like a prayer
  is the trunk that widens through time
rooted in layers of meaning
      that nurture the living shrine

The particular species of cherry used for inspiration here is prunus avium, or wild cherry—sometimes called sweet cherry.

Publication History:

California Quarterly — Summer 2023

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I must be

One may be able to infer from these words the nature of an inner struggle. It is a struggle that has endured in one form or another since childhood. Now that I’m a father, now that I look every day on my baby son and experience the wild array of emotions that come with watching him coalesce and evolve, this struggle has become all at once completely inane and yet all the more intense. It is winter. My one method of preference is exposure. Yet I have a powerful new reason to cope with the fears and uncertainties that have plagued my being for as long as I can remember.

I must be

I must be more than memory,
   more than just a name,
more than faded echoes cast
      from pictures in a frame.

I must be more than faint suspicions
   coiled in the heart,
smoke-like apparitions drifting
      through a starless dark.

I must be more than supposition,
   more than just a guess,
fashioned from a dust that fell
      through years of emptiness.

I must be more than stories told
   by uncles, aunts and kin,
anecdotes of vague recall
      from time beyond your ken.

I must be more than fantasies
   of how things might have been,
conjured up to fill a void
      that widened in my stead.

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Winter Relief

My hope was that I was going to be able to use this sonnet form to write a pen portrait of a man, possibly homeless, who during the winter ambles a ratty old bicycle down the avenues near where I work, dispersing bird seed to the fowl. He trundles along with a 5 gallon, neon orange bucket hanging from a handlebar. At various vacant lots, some of which are fenced in, he stops on the sidewalk and lobs great big handfuls of seed out across the gravel or asphalt. As he approaches one of the feeding places, the sky darkens with winged creatures, which land in a whirl of calls and flapping feathers. They are so used to this man that they let the birdseed fall directly upon them, bouncing from wing, beak and back.

I know nothing about this “bird man,” as I’ve come to think of him, save for the image of his moving among the streets in the dim light of dawn, arcing fistfuls of seed over his head and chest. His face is a mass of unkempt hair, his snow jacket old and held together with duct tape. His clothes are layered in tatters and crusted with dirt and debris. Yet for all his apparent misfortune, he has made it his mission to by some means acquire this seed and feed the city’s winged residents during the winter.

After a few weeks of trying to get the imagery in mind to bend to this sonnet form, I finally decided to give up and let the words and images find themselves. Sometimes the only way a poem gets written is to let go of the originating idea, allowing the words to choose and arrange themselves. Under such circumstances, the poet merely facilitates a process that was somehow already occurring, already waiting disembodied in the ether to find a channel into existence.

Winter Relief

The mourning dove lifts pale, majestic wings,
illuminating vacant, asphalt grounds.
A shadow moves amid the murmurings
of feathered creatures stirring all around
him as unsteadily he trundles down
the frozen sidewalks with an orange pail
suspended from a handlebar; the sound
of squeaking tires mingles with a gale
of pigeons, sparrows, jays that dance like hail
across a gravel, weed-strewn parking lot.
He stops and probes the neon depths to bail
a scoop of birdseed—harmless scattershot—
which, reaching back, he arcs above his head
to bounce among the birds with even spread.

This is my 2nd Spenserian sonnet. It was my intention to strictly adhere to the rhyme scheme for this second pass at the form, but the word pool was just too small for the b scheme, so I kept extending it until enough words became available to allow for a fairly natural flow of language and imagery. Still a partial rhyme by all accounts, since all four words share the “oun” phonemes.

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Samsara

Birth. Death. Impermanence. Samsara. Samsara is a concept I was exposed to and learned about during my late teen years. At first, the notion of a never ending cycle of birth and death—coming and going—was somehow a comfort to my thoughts. But as I’ve meditated on the concept over the years, it’s become less and less of a comfort and I begin to grasp the value in learning how to find one’s way out of this never-ending stream of coming and going.

Here I reflect on the coming, the going, and the impermanence of it all. This is my 6th synthetic ode.

Samsara

i

Roiling coiling boiling
             beyond memory dreams
   phase and shift in amniotic mists
         swirl in the silence of pulsation
      swim in the stillness of song and dance

Slowly gently gradually
   sensations coalesce illuminating
shapes only somewhat guessed before
      till time takes hold and presses
long hard strained contractions
         bearing breath into the light
      where lungs expel a fluid reverie
   and struggle with thin arid vapors of life

Now spry pink fingers fan out
            new translucent maple leaves
      that ball and bob and grasp
         at each candescent moment
   each ray of raw potential
               emerging from the void

ii

Ailing paling failing
             beyond hope of recall
   yesteryears evaporate like mists
         drift in and out of apprehension
      drone in the absence of conscious thought

Fiercely surely naturally
   perception dissipates into a darkness
shapes only somewhat recognized
      as time slows down and shuffles
somber strained abstractions
         toward an ever shifting shade
      where lungs expand in fluid misery
   and struggle at each dim sensation of life

Here sun browned fingers curl up
            frail exhausted walnut leaves
      that twist and creak and claw
         at brief pellucid moments
   at dreams of lost potential
               returning to the void

iii

An old oak grows on the side of a hill,
the side that faces the afternoon sun;
on the ground in the grass, her litterfall
has collected around her ancient trunk,
its bottommost layers turned back to soil.

A short distance away the blanched remains
of a sister lies rotting in the grass,
her wood resculpted by late autumn rains
and frosts that covered her corpse with a glass
that deepened the wedges along the grain.

The old oak rises, the last of her kin;
her trunk is split and a third of her limbs
in perpetual winter scrape like bone
the progression of ever changing climes—
the blistering azure, the thunder’s groan.

In the shape of a crescent moon, decay
has collected around her knobby base,
the twigs and branches that once would display
a green that shimmered now turning to waste
where skeletal shadows reach out and pray.

Another third is beginning to wane,
the crown has turned to a light mottled shade
and the leaves have begun to curl and thin
where, before, a reflective glimmer played
like fairy folk dancing within the sun.

She is old; she was old when condors soared
in the skies that revolve above her leaves;
for centuries she has weathered the storms
that lumber in from the watery weaves
which pattern the sandscapes of distant shores.

Her time is near, as it nears for us all;
the vibrancy of her youth has been lost
to the powerful change that claims us all,
yet she faces the end and bears the worst
with a grace that exists within us all.

So here part i explores birth, or coming into being; part ii explores death, or going out of being; and part iii explores impermanence, or the stream of beingness. Most of the parallelisms in parts i and ii exist between the two segments. You may find it an interesting experience to read parts i and ii at the same time, line by line.

Another thing that may catch your attention as you read is that part iii uses an entirely different style than the first two parts. Everything about it is different. Parts i and ii read like free verse while part iii reads more like a piece of classical poetry. This is intentional. This is meant to jar the senses by jabbing a sliver of “impermanence” under the fingernail of thought.