death
“But have I now seen death? Is this the way
I must return to native dust? O sight
Of terror, foul and ugly to behold,
Horrid to think, how horrible to feel!"
Paradise Lost XI
Death
You? You are no sweet god as some have said.
No gentle twin of Sleep fathered by Night.
There is nothing gentle about you, fed
As you are on countless souls ripped from life.
Neither are you like the ancient spinster
Who watches, with her sharpened shears upraised,
Her sisters spin and twist then measure
The thread she'll snip with inflexible blades.It's Milton's portrait of you that's the best:
Putrid monster, bastard of sin, slack jawed,
Tormented by your hunger without rest
Till you're devoured by your own gnashing maw -
Death! God damn you! I'll cheer when your thread's run
Is finally snipped and - God be praised! - unspun.…the death of a beloved is an amputation…
C.S. Lewis
Death as a surgeon
it's hacksaw work at best,
a blunt-edged hatchet job.
you hammer without rest.
you chop and chop and chop.
no offer of medicinals
no help to ease the pain.
you gut and cut and bludgeon
and leave your victims maimed.
as sweet as any rabid dog,
as gentle as a storm,
as thorough as a raging plague,
persistent as the worm,
you take what you're not given;
you give what no one wants;
you make of ghosts the living
who are condemned to haunt
the spaces that she lived in,
the rooms his laughter filled;
the absence beats relentlessly;
How am I breathing still?
Yes, momento mori is an important principle to live by - remember *your* death and live accordingly. But death itself, though a part of nature, is originally unnatural. It is a horrible thing to see in another person and that is what I wanted to bring out in these poems. It is when someone we love is ravaged by death in front of our eyes and when they are taken by death that all the poetic language we use to mask its hideousness or to rationalize it flakes off and we are left staring at something simply repulsive. Death is an abomination, a curse, an end. It is only a beginning because Christ made it so for those who trust in Him for their salvation. "Now since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity, so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death." (Hebrews 2:14-15)
These are going in my commonplace, Esther. I had literal chills.