I have been saving this for Earth Day. Happy Earth Day, everyone! I hope this poem moves you the way it did me.
What Would I Say to You If I Were Dying
James Sands
Perhaps I would say, “That is a melodramatic title,”
but then I would say, and quickly, “I’m really not,
(just to counter your grandiosity)
not more than the usual, anyway, but
there is a chance you are.”
When the landscape has changed
to the barren architecture of despair,
I will be here.
Still, there is something to be said, I suppose,
for the going away—the absolute rest, for one;
perhaps you will end in view of a stand of fall maple
when the sky is orange-yellow turning late October night,
and a great murder of crows will suddenly swirl and swoop
to fill the air and the soon to be bare branches of trees
with black shapes and caws, raucous calls, beating wings, all
just to say no, you won’t be alone;
there will be others at their end too,
so many others—all taken by you.
When the landscape has changed
to the barren architecture of despair,
I will be here, waiting
where the moon is a ghost.
There can be solace in that—for some, I suppose,
and I will wait for those to return in different anatomy
rendered flesh by some future scripted sea,
where the waters lap rhythmically and silent
against a shore once more primordial
preparing an anthem, sonorous, resonant, and vital,
to the fecund paean of unrelenting life
rebuilt from the stars, nurtured
among the remnants and scars
of your human strife.
When the landscape has changed
to the barren architecture of despair,
I will be here, waiting
where the moon keeps ghosts
on the acrid night air
for the smoke that remains
of your madness to clear.
photo credit: NASA
