POEM
"It is the living who cannot"
It is the living who cannot
live without the dead,
who wish them
back,
who need their presences,
their hands,
as Orpheus
held her hand, Eurydice’s,
to lead her
back to earth out of
the gulf of Hades,
as I
need yours
It is not so much
the dead
who need us
now
(as we think they do)
& that reconciliation
we long for, that knowledge
of each other to the uttermost,
which could assuage us,
they are
one step beyond it & suffer us
to long for them.
If they could
return, it would be out of
patience with us merely: their need to
console us. For somehow an indifference
possesses them, for all their tenderness
& they see beyond us,
even if
what they see seems to us
nothing
“It is the living who cannot” from What Are Winds & What Are Waters by Hilda Morley (Kingston, Rhode Island: Moyer Bell Limited, 1993). © 1988 by Hilda Morley. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Source: What Are Winds & What Are Waters (Moyer Bell, 1993)
