Poems by Phil Rees

when my meat burned you sat by the pyre the heat of my cooling ashes warming you like my embrace

eventually you gathered and scattered the remnants

a little in the ocean grain by grain from a quiet kayak

some in our garden to feed the trees we’d carried between our early homes pot by larger pot until we found a place to set down roots

some on the beach where we found a small pebble eroded with a perfect hole for the thread of your necklace

sometimes you cried then later honored our shared wish and so the moments of happiness amid the grief became moments of grief amid the happiness until your turn

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This work by Phil Rees is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.