I write the title, you write the poem! Reblog with your piece :D
Based on this prompt by @goose-lit
MERCY?
Forgive me for writing another poem
About death.
This one is no ghost story, I promise,
Except everyone in it is a ghost.
It's not about corpses rotting,
Although everyone in it
Is slowly, slowly decomposing.
Tell me, what are we,
The body or the mind?
Our breath or our dignity?
I have seen them wile away on hospital beds
After hospital beds
After shrunken beds that used to be
Marriage beds where to feel alive.
I have seen them buried in their head
In a chest in the depths of failing remembrance,
I have heard them calling the names
Of those long gone
As if they could see them-
Maybe they were already
More of their world than ours.
I have watched them losing motion
Beeing spoon fed-
They say old age is a return to childhood,
But it isn't, it's a distortion of it,
A bleak masquerade with no end but the black end,
And no matter how I loved them
I asked myself, everyone around me asked themselves,
Would a swift death be
Mercy?
Or is there still value
In groans and diapers and tears,
Is there still a twinkle at the very bottom of their eyes,
Is every minute left on this planet
Mercy?
When I am on that bed, when you are,
Faded husks of who we were,
If the grim reaper came
On dark crow's wings
And promised you mercy,
Whichever you meant by that word,
What would you ask for?
The bullet or the slow, slow drowning?
Forgive me for writing about death again.
You see, I am talking about life,
The last chapter, how the book ends,
With questions without answers.
We turn our heads, pretend not to see
Or smell or hear
The body that's always been dying
Exhaling its last trembling, indecent breaths,
Yet those are the lucky ones,
The ones who survived
Childhood and wars and illness and plague.
Were the others cursed or blessed?
Do any of us
Get to know
What mercy is, after all?
F. P.
