Taking stock

Today the world ponders the life and passing of Nelson Mandela.  And this holiday season as a whole can bend one toward reflection.  As well as burden.  In my life, it's been November where I've taken special notice since it holds for me powerful firsts and lasts, deaths and births, redemptions and travails.  Yet there's no wonder, with winter on its way (at least in our hemisphere), that anyone would take this time to take stock, store up.

I was remembering our car wreck of 1995 when I started this poem last month, already thinking on the mysteries of dying and living, when I learned of another unexpected death.  A dear soul left this world at the age of 38.  Just as his impact and that of Mandela do not end here, today, this poem could conceivably keep on going, no matter the number of Novembers I have to come. . .



Not very often now it'll flash in my brain I could have died that night but I was carried through
the force through dusk through the trauma through to dawn and I have not tried to count
the dawns I have been carried into since since I don't think it's a debt I could carry

Why am I given what others are not or do I not have what's theirs and is it better than life life
is so strange I said when she told me of some betrayal - or payback - maybe order made of
something and I beg again if I might see into what seems disorder but then catch myself

Are they really caught up into immunity, purity, ceasing of insanity insanity that's knowing
they are in fact more sane than this whole damned existence of dawns and dusks and force
is it that will carry them through trauma to something better than any could calculate

November you've had such darkness I have very often thought was dispelling through what's
been given me since that night but today you are carrying a richness of neither dark nor light
alone but of both and all all things made vivid, palpable, if only in flash, invigorated dusk