Day 627: The Funeral is a Homecoming

I.
You climbed out of the grave
Thinking you’d find him there
Beyond the mound
How far could you have wondered
when every island we ever loved was now a woman who forgot how to stay

II.
When your mother left
The heels of her shoes cracked the foundation of the earth
Left the tectonic plates bare
We hung on the edges
Barren
Pretending we were home and warm where we were
But we were nothing
Not near that what we remembered

III.
There is a space that has been left full
We have avoided empting
In your absence
As to show respect we hung
Parts of our memories
when we thought you’d return
if you had the choice to

IV.
Letting go was like watching the ice melt
Knowing when we woke up
For a moment
We wouldn’t recognize the world
If we had to
We’d look at old pictures
And smile like muscle memory told us
Itll be okay
Your mother insists
We aren’t quite there yet

V.
The day your brother dies his first memory
Rather
Your first one of him
Will shoot its way through every ounce of water in your body
Will send tsunamis tumbling through your blood stream
Make you feel alive
Then your pulse with thicken like cooled chocolate
And you
will remember he is not missing
He is not returning
You are only remembering

VI.
When the sky finally falls
Like you have waited for it to
It will not all come down at once
Nothing above you with shatters and break like you imagined
Rather
With a crack of thunder you will witness the blue fracture
And parts of the universe will fall over your body
Making you heavy
Unable to move any longer

VII.
When they find you
Where you left yourself
They will ask the hard questions that you should refuse to answer
Like why are you here
Broken
Of all places
Shouting to the gods
Asking them to take you
Why haven’t you moved on
From this place
yet

VIII.
When your mother finally returns
Most likely on accident
She will call you a failure
At getting away
A failure at being more
Than she
A failure at healing
It will be the first time you have spoken in centuries
But the distance between you will shorten with the seconds
When she pulls you in
You will see parts of your bother in the craters of her pupils
You will remember why you needed her
Why you missed her too
When he was the only one
Who wasn’t coming back