SUBMITTED BY:Taylar Lane(Jani's daughter)

A very beaautiful poem about her father, this is awesome, thank you for shaing Taylar.

 

Taylar Lane

 

 

Requiem for My Father

 

I. 

 

I wish I could have been

at the beach that day.

Not as your daughter, 

but as a stranger 

standing by. 

It would have looked so beautiful

from far away, 

without the film of tears

clouding my eyes. 

 

But there is life 

after death. 

 

It takes not the shape

of angels, nor does it haunt

my unlit bedroom 

like a ghost,

dressed in whatever clothes

you died in. 

 

Instead, it enters

like a lightness 

and it settles

in my bones. 

 

II. 

 

Your music lives inside me, 

plays my veins with quick

fingers, like a

whorehouse piano man. 

 

I float up 

through your pale hair

like morning dew 

ascends 

to meet the rising sun. 

 

And your sadness makes its home

in me, heavy

as an anchor

sinking through me

like a stone.  

 

III.

 

We spread between us

like a blanket 

distance, at what cost? 

So often we forget 

to search for what 

is not yet lost. 

 

Before, if we had wanted

to, we might have spanned

the gap.

But now there lies 

between us lands and rivers,

ever distant, which

no living soul can cross. 

 

An army of the fatherless 

stretches further than my eye

can see; a flood 

of mourning daughters 

from the landscape carve 

deep valleys with their tears. 

 

With one eye, do you see beyond

the moss of death 

to the vast deserts

of Truth? 

 

With the other,

do you see 

me? 

 

Does it bring you 

peace---that sweet 

lightning--

when you behold, 

in my verdant 

fields, the weeds 

and flowers of yourself? 

 

IV.

 

I received no invitation

to your immolation,

but I will carry 

in my heart the smoke

of your memory 

and the ashes

of what can never be, 

but might have been. 

 

 

How sad it is to see

the dissolution of

a day. 

 

How tragic that we fill

our hearts with names 

that death can take 

away. 

 

The ocean pulled you

to it like the tide

and left me lonely 

on the shore. 

I saw you, but only 

for a moment,

as the great silence fell 

once more.