How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy, Mister Death?

Thank you, I like him fine.

Buffalo Bill will never 

not be handsome now,

and his prowess won’t deteriorate.

And when I give him back

to the cradling earth again

– for I don’t get to keep them, you know –

dressed in a new body and sporting a new name

perhaps you’ll meet him once more, in a different dream 

… unless it is you I am holding then. 

Unless it is you I lead by the hand
to your new, true awakening….

At "imaginary garden with real toads" Brendan asks us to "dance with a ghost", i.e. to respond to another poem. (Well no, it was to play tennis, but I prefer to dance.) The original e. e. cummings poem is one of my favourites – and hey, if someone's "defunct", they're really a ghost! (I have read the cummings poem bitterly in the past, identifying with the questioner. So in a way I am here talking to myself, using Death's voice to persuade myself of a different, kinder perspective.)

The "different dream" is an allusion to the final passage of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, and in Death leading one by the hand I was recalling Sir Terry Pratchett's lovely posthumous tweet (involving his fictional character, Death).

Discovering Three Pratchetts Not Yet Read

I'm sitting up in bed last thing at night

reading Terry Pratchett – one of my grand-

daughter's books, which I seized on with delight

when I discovered it so near at hand.

I’m visiting for Christmas. It's all right 

that I'm in her space; she’s a good girl, and

is young enough to like the blow-up bed

she gets to use in the front room instead.

Or else she sleeps on a trundle mattress

in the study, but anyway I get 

her room and her bed and – what happiness –

three books of hers by dear Terry Pratchett:

Sir Terry, whose name I shall always bless

for Discworld and its inhabitants – yet

this is tinged with some grief. Though they live on,

their gently humorous author has gone.

They are ‘young adult’ books, a genre I

often choose for its own sake anyway.

I may be regressed, but I don’t know why

I need worry about that. Reading’s play

in my book (ha ha ha!) and I’m not shy

of admitting this. Could there be a day

without a book in it? No, not for me –

glad I’m still here, in bed with Terry P. 

Winding up the month (and year) with a final offering for the Poetic Asides Ottava Rima Challenge.

I'm also sharing this with Poets United's Poetry Pantry #384, the first after our 2017 Christmas break.

Happy New Year, dear readers!

Contradicting Sir Terry

 “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” 

― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

The warm darkness sits. The light

comes rushing in, breathless.

It plumps itself down

as in an armchair, and spreads,

taking up all the space.

But the darkness has not hurried

to get there first.

It was there already, always;

even before the beginning.

It was all there was —

Nothing and Everything;

the Everywhere. 

It shaped itself.

It became a womb,

it became a cradle.

God said,

‘Let there be Light’....

And afterwards

when we are finished, still

there shall be darkness.

Prompt 18 for 'Poems in April' at 'imaginary garden with real toads' is to be inspired by a Leonard Nimoy or Terry Pratchett quote.

Also linking to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #248