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UNTIL AFTER
Like the speed we don’t feel until after the rush,
and the dreams we don’t know till we waken,
and the sounds we don’t notice until there’s a hush,
are the souls we don’t love till they’re taken.
(Mike Cohen – c.1992)
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THE MISSING SCREAM
If you listen hard to the silence,
they say you can hear the angels sing.
But to me it sounds more like
the stars sobbing.
The police ruled it an accidental death,
and all rulings are final in these cases,
or may as well be.
It was concluded that she simply leaned too far out the window
and lost her balance.
Aren’t life and death always matters of equilibria
of some sort or another?
How often had she leaned out that same window?
What made this time so different, so fatal,
might have been a just so-slight shift.
The sudden unexpected plunge would make anyone scream.
It shocked me so to see her falling
that I nearly let out a cry myself,
but something held me back –
something in the silence of her fall.
So I just listened…
so hard I could hear the stars sobbing,
and yet, I didn’t hear her scream.
Maybe I should have listened sooner.
She must have done all her screaming before she jumped.
(Mike Cohen - c.1995)
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RISING
Yesterday’s task is unfinished;
tomorrow’s task is not begun.
Your physical powers have diminished
long before your work is done.
Your consciousness is clinging
to life’s receding spell,
and although you can still hear the ringing,
you can no longer answer the bell.
There’s a stirring your sense in your spirit,
but your limbs are too dense to respond.
Yet, although you can’t move to be near it,
here’s a presence you meet from beyond
the mounds of this world’s obligations,
the unwieldy earthly affairs
of our great institutions and nations -
the burdens man builds and man bears.
Now you know all of your labor
may at last be permitted to cease.
Heaven has granted a waiver.
Eternity’s signed your release.
The resolve of your spirit is proving
itself, as your body dies.
Though your muscles and bones are unmoving
and your flesh can but rest where it lies,
from amidst the remains you arise.
(Mike Cohen – Mar 1999)
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On the lighter side of death…
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LIKE A VIKING
I bid this thankless world farewell,
depart intrepid as a Viking,
expecting Valhalla to be a hell
of a lot more to my liking.
(Mike Cohen – Nov 2001)
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YOUTH-REVIVAL MOVEMENT
Forty may be the new twenty, and fifty the new thirty.
It would seem that age reduction is the trend.
And if sixty’s the new forty, seventy is the new fifty;
you can keep up the reversion to the end.
It’s the youth-revival movement,
but to join you must survive.
A lesser age is no improvement
unless you are alive.
So seventy’s the new fifty, or so we’ve heard it said.
For each age we attain, we claim a younger age instead.
We may say eighty’s the new sixty and ninety’s the new seventy
and a hundred’s the new eighty, but dead’s the same old dead.
(Mike Cohen – 2009)
Life expectancy is high
now that medical science has gotten so clever,
and yet the percentage of people who die
remains exactly the same as ever.
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POSTHUMOUS IRONY
The poet’s dead body was discovered in the living room.
Let’s repeat with emphasis.
The poet’s dead body was discovered in the living room.
Too bad the irony had to be lost on him,
The poet would have appreciated it if he were living,
but so long as he were living,
there could be no discovery of his dead body in the living room,
and that particular irony would not be,
at least not yet.
The reason poets write
is to leave something behind.
And while we know that what we leave behind
will, in its turn, leave us behind,
a poet can transcend this inevitability to some small extent.
That is what I am attempting here.
And that is why I am leaving a copy of this in the living room
just in case.
I’ll be damned if I’m simply going to lie down
and let perfectly good irony be lost on me.
(Mike Cohen – Oct 2011)
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