The Yin and the Yang …in Eastern thought, the two complementary forces that make up all aspects and phenomena of life.
AN AFTERLIFE
Allow me to be morbid
To think of death
The afterlife
My next life
When life is now so full
It is not seemly
And not to be countenanced
To tempt fate
With supposition
Of a dubious kind
And yet I do
I do because I am
And the I that I am
Needs to contemplate
Beyond the now
Into the shadows of the future
The mysteries
Of my dust
My ashes
Not reincarnation
Because there will be
No me to be reborn
Merely a redistribution of
My dust and an accompanying
Acquisition of a sensate soul
To replicate a birth
An existence
And an organic life
In Nature’s cyclic motion
No out-of-body experience
Has persuaded me of this
No religious faith has
Swayed my thought
On the borderlands of life
I pause to contemplate
My future
Beyond the Pale
In That No-Man’s-Land of the imagination
That Heaven or that Hell awaiting
My next existence
The I who will not be me
Frightens me
The diversity of possibilities
For my re-formed dust to inhabit
Allow me no certainty
For there can be
No sense of continuity
Only, as now,
An unawareness
A not-knowing
Of what has gone before
And of what will succeed me
The me that is not me
New flesh, new history
New mind, new destiny
But without
Any sense of newness
No connection to the past
The same not-knowing
About the future
I could be so much worse off
And yet I know
it will not be me
Not someone who remembers
The pleasures which have pleasured me
The joys which have made me joyous
Or the loves which enchanted me
For I will be he
Or she
Or it
Just someone who exists
Painfully sentient
Plausibly penitent
Regretting
Perhaps rejoicing
In a life
As I do now
In that life
I am afraid to leave
‘Nature’s Query’ … Photograph – WHB 2016 ©
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