Deaths We Can Survive

You
are the Survivor who
lived through an accident,
an illness, a bad experience
and stayed alive – except you
didn’t, part of you died.

Part
of you stayed where the angst
crescendoed, part of you lay broken
and spent. You cannot deny what
has been wrenched from the sum
of your soul – and when you say
before the event, ‘I will survive you’,
you’ve already begun to die.

In subtle ways
we die each day to stay alive;
little deaths define the fragile
flower with too few hours to live,
find ethereal in fleeting chords heard
soft on breeze that briefly wafts, heeds
the gorgeous thought too swift to capture
in a mood that breathed and bloomed and
died the instant it arrived; but these
are deaths we can survive...
©20 March 2007, I.D. Carswell