The First Day Come Fall

With your eyes now closed, I stand so still, before you,
Placing foremost those thoughts, with hands upon the coldness
Whose still waters, I feel the nothingness in me chilling through.

Faces, full of frenzied kindness, saturated that day,
Until nightly horses galloped in slow, streamlined silence
With three quarters of a century, atop their heels, carried away.

Behind your other flesh I stood, with every other delegate who remembers
After they’ve received you into their very last eyes;
As every moment we may walk, you’ll keep with us in our members.

There you’d stay, like a crushed robin, laid down at its mother’s breast
Under the stones that name sheol’s avenues,
As the feathers wrap and shelter you in an earthen nest.

Sacred utterances were sprinkled over you in the soft, drizzled air,
Chanting down Yahweh’s promise of your soon restored flight;
As we returned with heads lifted, falling again, when we got there.