TIMOR MORTIS

By Jack D. Harvey

We make him dress up

hooded cloak, scythe and skull

the Grim Reaper,

put a name to it

sinister slapstick

to cover the skeleton he is

Furtive footsteps

heard but not seen

in the wooly uncertain night,

in the darkened hospital ward,

in your last agony;

he's always eager for our passing

To sate him. bate

the restless life around him;

his petty noise in your delirium,

the ghost of sound

echoing against old men's ears,

against the baby's tiny shell of an ear,

against the nightingale's sweet

voice, captivating;

all these and others competing

for your last glimmer of attention

on your way out.

When he comes, when he comes,

the soft schuss of a shot skier

making his lone descent.

These sounds and your last movements

pure and simple as moonlight

and the trees bending in the wind

come together, foretell the end,

one way or another,

peaceful, resigned, painful, brutal,

in our midst, death, like clockwork,

regular and familiar as the morning sun.

Even in the last extreme

hardly ever do we say "enough!"

and mean it,

grasping for one more day

one more blink of an eye

one more good green spring

we continue to hope,

until cut to the quick,

stopped cold,

we hear his voice say come

and away we go

leaving all we know behind,

departing for whatever

eternity holds of emptiness,

of death, of nothing,

of even less than nothing.

Limitless, hidden beyond horizons

the gape of the unknown;

at the end of the road

undisclosed forever what fate

that fearsome spectre,

voluminously berobed,

that everlasting mystery

holds for all of us

in his bony emphatic hand.

#darkpoetsclub