The Living Sepulchre
I am a vault of vanished stars,
a vessel for the void’s ancient dust.
Within this bone-frame, brittle and brief,
sleep the cinders of a thousand suns,
whose light went out long before the world was woke.
Consider the carbon in the curve of a rib —
It may have been the marrow of a mind.
From a distant, drowned system,
a thinker of thoughts on a pale, perished moon,
whose atoms now pump in my pulse.
We are not the masters of this meat,
but the mourners and the makers both.
Every breath is a former being’s homecoming,
each and any drop of blood a river of relics,
flowing through the landscape of the now.
We do not walk toward the earth to find an end;
we carry the earth, the stars, and the silence within.
Look closely at the skin, this soft shroud —
See how the past persists in the present.
We are all the grave.
