The days may be gone but the light still simmers through your sturdy bones, I learn how to become mute through the orifices of your nose and I do not expect any compensation for the minutes lost in adoration meandering through each part of your body
I watch the movement of your barely moving hand and I remember how it is to live fully and then suddenly be assaulted by the weight of days as if you are in me and me in you
I touch your forehead and perceive, through your breathing skin, that your life and mine (in this state) are but ephemeral moments that go away in less than the blink of a butterfly’s wing
I look around your room and concentrate on details that have passed by my eyes without any second thought but which now appear as vivid and fundamental as fresh mornings when your senses are lazily awakening and life makes the most sense: your blood flowing slowly but surely to meet the challenges of a long day
I smell your body and the decay that is approaching and I imagine the stunning beauty of your limbs when you were a child running unimpeded as beautiful as a morning mercy
I put my head close to yours and I hear the inner thoughts your dying soul is reminiscing about, and I envisage all the dreams that you have had through your long life, from birth to this very moment, dreams of utter beauty and victory in life, from days filled with vigorous tasks when your body felt the most alive, the most able, the most noble, to days when mornings and nights gave you moments that nothing, nothing can recreate, moments of simple merciful beauty, like the gradual darkening of the approaching dusk or the arrival a new awakening clarity with all its promises, after the night has passed and the dreams have left its vivid notes
Your days are all there, entangled in your wrinkled body which I observe with the sadness of a daughter losing her father, imagining the loss of her own body, a body still young and yet already feeling in its universal memory that its days too are counted
For we are nothing but intersecting light passing through
Or the momentary beauty of the horse cavalcading through the open fields
— Irene Marques, Sample poem from the collection The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit (Mawenzi House, 2012)
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