ALL THE ANGELS ARE DYING



Human, they leave us in the brightest spring,
or on the hinge of a dry season, gone
as late November leaves, fallen wings
wafting groundward. The caesura song
of their departure discords the world. Do
they think of what their deprivation leaves?
This is loss, and what loss denudes:
This life dimmer, that much more grieved
for ourselves. Each of their blank deaths
wearing the faces of our lost fathers.
The darkness was lit by their frosty breaths
and silvery hair. And we stand, survivors,
our hands, emptied of our own lives, imploring
upward, shaping the air like prayerful, absent wings.

 

                    ----------------Nicholas Samaras

 

Nicholas Samaras is the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Awards with his first book of poetry, Hands of the Saddlemaker.

 

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