Words for the Living, a Poem by Patrick Morgan

“We are related still to those who have gone before us.  They are, in a very real sense, gone.  But they have not disappeared.  They are connected to God, and therefore to everything that God loves.  They are not so much somewhere else as somehow else, and thus they can relate to us in perhaps very intimate ways.”—Bishop Robert Barron

I am in the water of your tears,

the intake of your breath,

the pressure of your knees

as you kneel in depths

of solitude and sorrow,

half-remembered Bible verses,

the memories of picnics and birthdays and family dinners,

the presence of your hand in mine

at church

as we shake hands and hug a “Peace Be With You” we wish would never end.

Please know

I am closer to you now than your own body.

I have returned to the source of all Love,

the Beyond Body,

where prayers never cease in the saying,

and death never ends in decaying.

The atoms of your body cannot feel

my embrace—

this is the pain of loss, the price of clay that loves.

Yet we exist

at this moment,

this immensity of time

and place,

knit together by a loving embrace—

feeling the same Love

in two separate states of being,

droplets bending the same light

at two angles of adoration,

the same breath

at different moments of expiration.

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Patrick Morgan is a Louisiana-based writer originally from Watertown, New York.  His poems have appeared or are appearing in, among other venues, the Catholic Poetry Room, Footnote: A Literary Journal of History, and Valiant Scribe (“Midnight Influx,” “To the Homeless Man I Lied To”).  His writings about poetry can be found in We Are Already One: Thomas Merton's Message of Hope: Reflections to Honor His Centenary (Fons Vitae), The Pocket Instructor: Literature (Princeton University Press), and The Pocket Instructor: Writing (Princeton University Press).