Charon
for Fay Zwicky
I never learned to fear Charon, just as I neverLearned Latin. The book (from England) came too lateSo I was behind in class. I never caught up.
Coins for the ferryman? Any price seemed high While blood flowed so easily. To be young Was always to be taken for granted.
There were older brothers Over There, even dads, That was just one of those things. There was a price, no doubt of that.
But we were exempt. Money was nothingAs mortality was nothing to us. It was a dead language. We were very young.
Now I am too old and Charon is waitingI finger the coins but do not know the words,All I remember might as well be Latin.
Is there a language for dying? Is thereAny language at all? Charon is waitingBut I still hear the ripple of water. Or is it just my pulse?
Light
We are used to light. It is the beaconGuiding us and we ignore it at our riskNot that we ever dream of abandoning it.
Light has become more than a mere friend,It is almost part of the familyThough it has not the ability to betray us.
Dark remains perpetually strange.Why is that? It is as if fearWere part of our essential makeup.
Yet we cannot live forever in light;There is that need of darkness somewhere;Sleep is encouraged by what it has to offer.
We are plagued by certainty as much as by uncertainty.Light is the norm the spectrum by which we live.But darkness is always there, like something in wait.
We dream of an end, and we really knowThat dark will claim us, that light is only temporary.We may be accustomed to light, but only fools take that for granted.
Smell
Underneath everything we touch is the smellOf something too obvious to expressAnd yet we say there is nothing, nothing at all.
We have learned to live with a multitude of smells,They simply do not bother us, they are everydayAnd part of the natural world we have inherited.
There is nothing more obvious than the smell of living,It is like movement, and, like movement, it is everywhere.Like sweat it is ourselves, only the language is different.
The smell of dying is also everywhere.Why do we hide it with cosmetics?We are appalled. Why are we appalled?
The earth is moving. Such a short while we are here.Every smell is somehow precious.We cannot afford to be choosy. There is nothing to deny.
Thomas Shapcott is a writer, orginially from Queensland. He was