Death is a comforting pillow
On which to lay my head
To hide for awhile from the searing pain,
From the all-consuming pain —
A shelter, impermeable barrier,
Against all whom the soul has fled;
Death is a comforting pillow
On which to lay my head.
Death is a velvety darkness
In which to encase my soul
To hide from the evils of torment
To hide from the soul-deep cold
For those whose hearts are shattered
But tears no longer roll;
Death is a velvety darkness
In which to encase the soul.
Death is the final goodbye,
Clear, concise, and cold —
The click of the closing door of fate,
An empty house, unsold.
Death is a final goodbye,
Clear, concise and cold.
©1989
In the kid-lit blogosphere, many bloggers post children’s poems on Fridays. I rarely to never do, since I rarely read kid’s poetry even when I was a kid… and as you can see, I never really wrote it…
I woke up again this morning thinking about Isaac. I suspect I dreamed him alive again, which I do from time to time. Since I
didn’t see him all that much after I graduated from college, my mind takes for fact the last mental file I have on him: at home, playing jazz on the piano, kids crawling over him, eating raisins, one-by-one, out back doing something, not in my line of sight. Still among the living, only out of sight…
Isaac was the first college professor who taught one of my poems, who gave me the …conceit to believe that I could be a writer. I edited both our school newspapers, and periodically put in something of my own, using a pseudonym to keep it under the lights. As a freshman, I submitted a poem to our college’s literary magazine, and Isaac asked me if he could use it for his freshman Eng101 course in the Spring. Especially since I wasn’t taking it (I opted for other courses, since I didn’t have to take the basics), I was beyond flattered. I tried to sit in on the class, but then had to leave because I got hives — oh, the excitement, wee fluttering hearts and all.
Looking back, I can see that this is a dreadful poem on many levels (‘To hide for awhile?’ What, can we reanimate, then? This is obviously reflecting what many people assume about suicide, and lets you know just how mature I was[n’t].), but I am again touched deeply by the kindness he showed a fledgling writer.
Isaac died June 30th, 2004. I miss him.
He was always in another room; I was always going to get around to talking to him, without the funny, sunny wife, without his garrulous kids, without the noise, without the precarious stack of books and periodicals in his office. There was a depth there, his soul was like an oil painting that museum-goers sit before in silence in an empty room peering from every angle, striving to understand. I waited too long. Too late, too late, too late.
What irony that I had the conceit at sixteen to write about death, and he knew all about it before me.