A Universal Indian Fate

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Please let me sing when I am dead above

My body.  Let me hover there in song

And sing above the little shread of love

That flesh remembers as I start that long

Unbodied flight.  Before you stuff me in

The tomb, let levitating, flickering soul

Remember its most flashing, flaring sin

And maybe even righteousness, that scroll,

That tight, that rhyme of parchment that I tried

To write though it will burn away as well

In whiffs of numbness.  I will be as fried

As martyrs in their chained up, staked up hell.

  Prepare a widow’s conflagration, pyre

    Of love denied me in my fleshy fire.

© Phillip Whidden