You only realize the honesty in death when loved souls do not home one too many nights...

You only realize the honesty in death when loved souls do not home one too many nights
Why little boys have to die on Wednesday evenings in communities lack luster lack esteem is beyond the answers this citizenship has summoned thus far
Oh, the vulnerability of these bodies we love
We must have a paranoid love for our siblings
Especially since those whose blood etches the concrete are so profound
We must always treat them like
Hidden gems
Since their time of fruition may never come •

Everyone must die, but the deaths of those who are so young are a different genre of pain. It hits you differently. More foreboding. More despairing. Less hope for the world. The general thought is: "Why them?" As if death has a conscience. Or an opinion. We are forced, with time and through no decision of our own, to let them go. To accept. All we may have left is the prospect that one day, we will see them again. Less their corporeal form.

But it is not just their personalities we loved. It was their bodies. Their warmth through caress. It was the way their hair smelled. The affection through the sound of their voices... those things which are human in form, and not able to be readily transferred beyond.

None of us knows what happens when we die. We are all here ignorant of the before and the after, walking only in faith, and in hope. Hoping that the love will not have been all for naught. That we will experience these things with them again, somehow. That aspiration for these things is tangible and able to be held, just as we all held these young ones in their infancy. Hope, that all is not lost, for eternity. Hope... is inherent, and all that we inherit from the bounds of beyond. •

Poem from Four Years in Chrysalis
© Aisha Tariqa Abdul Haqq Publishing
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