REQUIEM 
 


How desperately we wished for you
a dignified death.
What were we thinking?
Your birth had no doubt been the usual mortifying comedy:
sluiced out, just like the rest of us, in a torrent of confusing fluids,
ankle-clasped, upended, and slapped on the ass in a room full of strangers.
Scant dignity there.
No wonder we choose to forget those moments,
and begin memory, instead, with the warm embrace of a breast,
the beautiful nipple.

 
Yet how unfortunate, this forgetting,
there being one million ways to describe us,
and only two through which we are inarguably defined.
Thus, standing on elevators
we struggle to maintain polite indifference,
waiting on checkout lines and in movie queues
feign the stoppering of our ears, and
all of it a ruse —
we each most yearn to penetrate the other,
seeking first the deeply shared,
only then moving on to discovery.


 
But with our births unavailable,
crossed off, forgotten,
erased from that brief and uncontestable list,
a list no longer than a cry and its echo —
the litany of an instant —
which does not include, despite our wishing it so,
love nor passion,
and does not include, although we might think that it would,
our first two-wheeler, a harvest moon,
the stories our fathers told us,
the songs our grandmothers sang,
but only those two constant brackets of our
inconstant lifetimes,
we are left, simply and disquieted,
with our deaths.

 
Left, standing on elevators
left, standing in lines,
knowing what we are waiting for
but unwilling.
We feel it approach, we look away.
Something rises up in us at unguarded moments —
it is like that sore and threatening tooth
we cannot quite be rid of the urge to probe.


 
Unwilling, we will speak of it, but
telegraphed: it is always elsewhere, even if only in the next room.
Always his death or her death,
this death or that death
and now yours, which we so desperately wished would be
painless, peaceful, arrived at in your sleep,
dignified, mercifully quick,
so that you’d never know what hit you.


 
In the end,
your death was what it was,
nothing we could wish made any difference.
So where are you now?
We don’t know, and
if we had not been such fools
we wouldn’t have wasted all those wishes on you
but wished ourselves backwards instead —
back, back past the taste of the body-hot milk,
past the dazzling lights, the wetness and noise,
back to what came before,
(because it is this, alone, that may have helped you),
back to our births, which,
like our deaths,
are a doorway,
and then a surprise. 


 
Robin Halevy worked for fifteen years as a public school librarian/creative writing mentor. She currently lives in the Florida Keys.