In wide-brimmed hats and jackets long and gray,
With notebooks filled with poetry and yearning,
You turned to dust and ashes far away,
Like lilac branches that will cease returning.
You are in lands where shapes do not exist,
Where all is broken, tangled, and divided,
Where skies are just a grave mound in the mist,
And moons are frozen, from their orbits guided.
There, using some unknown, obscure tongue,
A synod of mute insects sings in choruses,
There, with a tiny lamp that he has swung,
A beetle-man greets friends in silent places.
Are you at peace, my comrades of the past?
Is it so light? Is ev\'rything forgotten?
Your brothers now are roots and ants at last,
And blades of grass, and sighs, and dust-motes\' rotten.
Your sisters now are scarlet pinks in bloom,
The lilac buds, the splinters, chicks around you...
No longer can your silent tongue recall
The brother left above, where shadows found you.
He has no place as yet within that land,
Where you dissolved, like shades of light careening,
In wide-brimmed hats and jackets, hand in hand,
With notebooks filled with poetry and meaning.