GREEN EYES

Remember how we'd spend hours together
musing on the subject of life after death?
Well, now you know much more than I.

My face, that everyone used to say
so mirrored yours,
became bathed in tears, glittering
like diamonds hardened by pain
as I tried so hard not to feel.
Skeletal hands of grief were crushing and crushing
my insides to a mush. They wrung out emotions,
while my voice still called out your name - a
disembodied, alien voice that refused to believe
it had survived you.

Day-by-day my brother moved on,
speaking of you less and less, as if
in denial that you'd ever existed.
And it stung me to the core.

Each night I just lay awake in the darkness:
a Wounded King of Arthurian myth,
my shoulders knotted to a spinal column
that had grown painfully rigid.
In sleep, when it briefly came out of total exhaustion,
I dreamed I was buried alive - cramped
into the grim coffin beside your lifeless form.
I even fancied our Spirits were bound together
with barbed wire that tore my Soul to shreds.
Still I clung to you, begging you
to take me home with you
into your Spiritual World.

Then, I was comforted by the scratchings.
Throughout the year following your passing
they grew increasingly loud and frequent.
Oh how I wanted to believe
you'd returned to haunt me -
rather than accept the simple truth
that a squirrel had gained access to the attic
from somewhere beneath the eaves
and was raising a family up there.
That squirrel, to a tortured mind,
had become your disembodied Spirit.
I heard your voice in those sounds:
in their speaking for you and their mourning for me,
they seemed to weave me into the fabric of your Being.
And I lay there in your death,
already mentally beneath the frozen earth.

And such unwillingness to let you go
did eventually bring you back to me.
When the despair finally overwhelmed me
and I contemplated ending it all,
you came and held me in your arms
and told me I must go on,
that it wasn't my time yet,
and explained that a seed you'd planted long ago
still had much maturing to do
and had yet to fulfil it's purpose.

Oh the peace those words brought,
and how cleanly they cut through such galling despair!
In that precious moment I finally understood...
you were still closer to me than hands and feet.
Then later that night when I glanced in the mirror
I saw the whole picture - my true Spiritual Heritage -
for the first time.
It was there in stark clarity:
there, in the green of my Father's eyes.