Poem: "Life Beyond Life"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem was inspired and sponsored by minor_architect.

Life Beyond Life

It is disorienting at first,
I confess,
death being as exhausting as birth -
no wonder
it is a thing customarily reserved for elders.
The young have no idea how to handle it.

But an elder knows how to handle anything,
arriving with memories packed as tightly
as sensible spare socks in a backpack.
If nothing in the hereafter is quite familiar,
well, nothing is altogether unfamiliar either.
It is like this, it is like that -
there is always something for comparison.

And there are the people who need looking after,
of course, the kinfolks back on Earth
going about their young lives
and wishing desperately they could talk to
great-grandma, grandpa, mama
one more time.
So you watch them, and you listen to their woes,
and sometimes
you give the world a sharp smack with a stick
to make it behave.

Then there are the babies-to-be,
the souls waiting for birth into the world of the living,
who hover around newlyweds and cry for attention.
Someone has to help them along.
So you bundle them up carefully,
helping them squeeze into flesh as strange and stiff
as a new pair of shoes, asking them:
“Did you remember to pack your talents?
Do you have your virtues?” and then saying,
“Well, go pick some out. Hurry, or you’ll be late.
Your birth is here! Your birth is here!
No, just leave that, I’ll clean up - get going!
You don’t want to miss it.”
It’s not so different, really,
from the first day of school
and you and yours have gotten through those
time and enough.

It’s nothing you can’t handle,
rest assured;
being an ancestor is a lot like being an elder,
only it’s easier to whack the world when you need to
and you no longer have old bones to creak.