Suffering: The Stauros Notebook
 
Suffering is a quarterly publication of Stauros USA
 
Editor
 Louise Dickey
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  THE STAUROS NOTEBOOK    VOLUME 26 NUMBER 4 WINTER 2007  print version
 

The Committal

by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner
The raked earth mingles these ashes.
The clay absorbs the coffin whole.
The sea accepts and swallows
The tumbled building’s dust now sacred soil.
 
Those bodies we loved,
that bright hair,
the softness at the neck’s nape,
the vein-etched forehead,
we now hand over
to the elements that elemented them.
 
They have not yet begun
to be themselves
nor in this life were fully so
but wait for time to catch them up,
this dying merely prelude
to the body’s fugue,
its realization
in concrete reality,
a visible polyphony.