And so death proves our true geography
The coastline to the island of our days.
Is not the leaf rnould of last autumn's holocaust
the sepulchre of tomorrow's aconite?
Does not death define life, yielding
the last, long logic of reality?
May we not say that though death is our ending
it holds life in gestation as the night
is the womb of day, and as awakening
circumscribes sleep, entombing it with brightness?
We move among these images, are becalmed
between question and answer; truth's awful brilliance
dazzles the occluded vision of our hope.
Be still, be hushed then, now that death's bright shadow
falls like a laser-beam across the sundial.
Twilight thickens among the olive trees
and in the garden all the flowers close.
Rest now, bright hero among the cool shadows,
your agony won, night transubstantiates
the sour dough of our quotidian bread.
Golden, the daybreak of the first Sunday
shall fill the fields of sky with a ripening
harvest of Orient and immortal wheat.
