Your Soul Released, Having Risen (Poem)

Your Soul Released, Having Risen

   for Patrick
   March 25, 1950 - May 5, 2009

Those days
     you could not fathom,
          we counted out

of our range, too,
     each becoming another
          sworn into our more familiar blues,

the arguments of fictions
     mere proofs that love can't move
          the way such cells in you

then moved, overworking
     thyroid and lung to body entire,
          spreading the mischief unexorcised.

You stood
     only to fall that night,
          your last in your own house.

A call was made,
     the first of many known
          to seal one mother's hope

to sisters', their waiting somewhere ended.
     Two years on, what holds claim
          remains not how the priest

made the sign or bathed
     us all in incense and light
          but how we, with breath inhaled,

made motion to follow you
     to your fixed end on earth,
          your soul released, having risen.

© 2011 Maureen E. Doallas