Excerpted from another blog, "The Poet By Day," written by Jamie Dedes.

HUNGER FOR BONE

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Jamie Dedes

we’ll scatter her relics, charred bone
blithe spirit, to be rocked by waves
to be rocked into herself, the rhythm
enchanting her with sapphire spume
sighs merging her poetry with the ether
rending hearts with shivered memory
shattering the ocean floor with dreams
lost in lapping lazuli tides, dependable ~
relief perhaps after pain-swollen years of
suckle on the shards of a capricious grace

these last weeks …
her restless sleeps disrupted by
medical monitors, metallic ping, not
unlike meditation bells calling her to
presence and contemplation, bags
hung as prayer flags on a zephyr,
fusing blood, salt, potassium chloride
into collapsing veins, bleeding-out
under skin, yellowing and puce-stained
fetid air filled, not with chant, but with
the tears of friends, come to love

when death arrived
it arrived in sound, not in stealth
broadcasting its jaundiced entrance
i am here, death bellowed on morphine
in slow drip, i am here death shouted,
offering tape to secure tubing, handing
her a standard-issue gown, oversized
in washed-out blue, this for her journey
under the cold pale of fluorescent light

eager and greedy, death snatched
her jazzy PJs, her bling and pedicures,
her journals and pens, her computer and
cat, death tried her dignity and identity
not quickly, no … in a tedious hospital bed,
extending torment, its rough tongue salting
her wounds, death’s hungering, a hunger
for bones, her white bones, but she in her
last exercise of will, thwarted death …
bequeathing her bones to the living sea

© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
Photo credit ~ Big Sur via Wikipedia and in the public domain.