or sense of failure and shame was stilled,
when the priest commended his soul to God,
and his body, wasted, to the ground.
More searing then than death, was life,
was youth on that deciduous landscape,
where, gnawed by falsehood and by truth,
I scoured them, "mourners" in frosted light.
Black shadows they were, in that Apocalypse.
Deceivers, whose truth I sought to reconcile to my truth.
And what of her truth? She who,
numbed by suffering, was pivotal to all of us.
Monumental then, it was: the life wasted,
the lives blighted, the resentments suppressed;
and profound the truth. That I did not love, and had never loved,
he, who had joined the Communion of Saints.
__________
© Cormac McCloskey
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