Maria Lopez
Requiem for Robert
It sold out fast. Polite mourners
offering prepared paper handkerchiefs
queued to shed their token tears.
Outside, a crowd of flowers appeared.
Standing self-consciously aside,
bowed by his memory, I cried – and
witnessed the lie. But
I remember…
On the alter, old friends
resuscitated your remains –
words, pregnant with nineteen years,
stirred a source deeper than watery fonts.
Your father, a stone pillar
crumbling with the burden of age alone.
your sisters, cradling your mother
fractured at the miscarriage.
Then by the winter grave-mouth,
they baptised you, this time, with dust
cut from christened ground
glistering dark as a universe.
I remember you
gone the way of a Saint
I remember you
living with his Halo slipped…
…requiem.