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YAHRZEIT, 7 ELUL 5759

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

Nancy Heneson
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Information

Type
Poetry/Fiction: Poems
Information
Palliative & Supportive Care , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , December 2010, pp. 485
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Five years ago in a misty rain
To the earth's hand you committed your spirit.
Flesh wrapped in linen, linen in wood,
Wood in turned soil, soil receiving stone.
Now on the same parched ground
In this, our summer of drought,
Your daughter kneels to place three stones
Upon the larger one, your monument:
Yitzak Yacob ben Leb, beloved husband, father, son.
Small stones, polished by a river,
Smooth, clean, of muted colors–mauve and gray and sand,
Respecting the quiet of this place.
Wet-faced, she sits in the grass, so dry it stings,
Touches the granite and studies the stones–
Their silence and their perfection.

* * * *

Evening gathers, and the drowsing crickets waken.
The light changes… a whoosh of crows' wings overhead,
Followed by a butterfly.
She rises, pulled by some slender thread
Back to the living, and
Leaves you to the river stones, the butterfly, the crows.