What Does and Does Not Change

 

There should have been earthquakes,

The rending of weeping skies,

A plague of darkness, wailing in the deep,

And all the pageant of offended nature

To mark the loss and rage against the time.

 

Instead there was only an absence –

An empty chair, one side of a bed,

The kind clichés of mumbled sympathy,

And silence enough to swallow you whole.

 

The sun rose, indifferent.

We went about our little lives.

There was everything – even laughter –

Even that day, the day we said goodbye.

 

And really, there was a certain solace in it.

The sky does not darken when a man dies.

Birds do not fall like stones from the heavens –

And he would never have wanted them to.

 

The world he loved goes on without him.

What else could be hoped for, of a world?

The mourning was left to us, the living;

The quake was felt in the beating heart.

 

Rain slid along a window. Children played.

An old dog barked at nothing down the road.

The trivial symphony of daily life

Washed over us. We breathed again.