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The service sheet (your funeral) inside

The plastic folder (bag) holds hair, your hair,

A tress, a curl, your very perfect pride.

Perhaps perfection is why Christ waits there,

Inside that folder kept there, on my bed,

Beneath my pillow.  Kept, there, is my grief.

The window holds your art, no petals shed

From weeping cherry, promising the leaf

Of life to come with meaninglessness of

The summers that contain no Charles, yet

To come without you, coming, lacking love

Of cherry meaning. That means life’s new threat.

  That threat will never go away.  Though bloom

    And leaf arrive, they come with doom, doom, doom.

©  Phillip Whidden