I didn't write this poem, but I love it so much I thought I'd share the words here. It was written by a very talented Alysia Harris.
Here's a link to a very powerful reading of the poem: https://youtu.be/O2UU3y58iuk
Also a link to the song accompanying the poem: https://youtu.be/CUqsWxuhDRA
There will come a day
When the fear of death will be the favored joke
Passed amongst corpses
And they're already laughing
My love, please don't be afraid
But there will come a day
When field mice play in our empty sockets
When our bones become homes for living creatures
Other than our egos
And when time will jostle our skeletons
Out of the composition that is me and you
And will write with us love letters that spell I owe you eternity
If we believe in life after death, then I often wonder why we assume the dead like coffins
When people were never meant to live in boxes
So I pray that our children will have the good sense to leave us a little wiggle room
Leave us exposed like stray dogs in a thunderstorm
And I will hear the breeze but I will not know it as the breeze
And I will feel the rain but not know it as the rain
And I will behold the sky but not know it as the sky
Instead, I will hear the breeze and think it is your laugh
Returned into the hearth of my ear
And I will feel the rain and think that it is the pinprick of your kiss and when the rain is tender
I will know that something has softened you
And when the rain is violent
I will know that something has shaken you
And, in this new found understanding
Without eyes or ears or hands or lips
Our bare bones will make love in the dirt;
Never knowing our nakedness
Imagine, the wind coursing through a calligraphy of weeds
In our disrepair we have grown gardens of ourselves
Sprouts of curious grass shooting from our eye sockets
Our knuckles, hard, smooth skipping stones meant for children's play
And the devilish sun, picking its way through your missing teeth and neither of us can keep from smiling these days
And the days go unnoticed and the nights go unslept
And we talk with our souls through the holes in our ribs
Where the organs once sat
Imagine, your skull and mine both reduced to grins
Both washed clean of our sins and our skins, going young again, forgetting why we ever wrinkled or why we ever furrowed our brow with the plow of anger
Become dust with me
Insignificant and everywhere
For I will love you even after your marrow has become a whisper and your bones;
Nothing but the snickering of gravel
Let us soak in the spaces our shadows left behind
Your skeleton, laced with mine
I will tie your soul to my ankles
And know what it is like to step into a dream
And you will try on my backbone and see how bad it hurt the day you said you were calling it quits
I don't remember why you left
Or why you came back
I don't know how many years have passed
I'm not really sure years passed at all
All I know is the rain falls;
You kiss me like a rain fall
The sun, it bleaches us clear and every day is a romance
All this to say;
We are already laughing
There is a wedding of earthworms and pebbles
Waiting when our tuxedo skeletons no longer fit
There is a place for our faces to lie planted beside
Forever smiling
There exists a place where we can still be in love
There exists a place where we can be still and in love
Just two gentle skulls
