Shadow Dance
Poetry by Gill Schwartz

MY DEATHING

Dying. The ultimate parting. The final good-by
to every one and thing. The Night at life's end.
The wakeless sleep. A nevermore to the tiniest
material thing, a sensation, a breath. No more.
All that belongs to the body now goes. Decays. Dissolves.
I gladly accept death's release from this pain racked mind,
from fear and foreboding.

Though, now bereft of loved ones,
of cherished things, of everything
related to that embodied self,
I realize that, nonetheless,
my consciousness continues.
And there is a sweet sense of awakening,
of shedding a tiresome burden.
Released from the hypnosis of the drama of that life,
what had been beyond my perceiving,
now grows apparent.
All those hurts and yearnings,
the loves, the losses; accomplished what?...
In death, I am released from my striving to transcend
the hollow suffering and joys of bearing flesh,
from the encumbrance of time and circumstance,
from imagined temptations and glories.

And more and more clearly, I understand
in the fading realities of that life past, that although
everything in time comes into being and passes away,
I am who I have always been, from before
that fleeting incarnation, during, and since.

 

 

 

Copyright Nathaniel Schwartz 2003   www.WisdomVisions.com