shot glass
title
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Peter Roberts


 

how we think of death, & how death is

architectonic are our dreams of death,
whether of paradise or purgatory,
nightmarish or pastoral; we
make monumental our mortality.

but real death is small, private, &
(aside from squirms of worms & microflora)
silent. each life, each death is
fleeting – the body, a snowflake, soon gone.

or, when death comes for a multitude, each
body, a single snowflake in a blizzard,
is lost, undifferentiable, gone before
the snowdrift melts, the windrow rots.