Not Hot Enough
Elegy for What's Left in the Ashes
Cremation's afoot
In a mortal's rite of passage
With the guilt and the soot
Only immortality can ravage
.
I watch through lead glass
The burning of flesh
Sublimating fed gas
To a soul's final crèche
.
Corpulent dispatch
Ashen crumbs fall to gravity
But the soul unattached
Flees a legacy's depravity
.
It panics in luminescence
Running from the fire
Suffers trapped evanescence
Incomplete in the pyre
.
Absolution fails, fruitless lavage
Leaving cindered memories that suffer alive
Rejecting any respite from life's cruel barrage
Retrieving the regrets that reveries revive
.
How much hotter does it need to be
To cleanse souls' sins that fear infinity?
How long should I burn it, to no longer see
An evil man's soul begging for clemency?
.
I look closely and, painfully, inspect the bearer
Of a remorseless face begging, baselessly, for mercy
I cannot unsee, vacantly, the eyes of the terror
Of a soul unprepared for atonement's eternity
About the Creator
Gerard DiLeo
Retired, not tired. In Life Phase II: Living and writing from a decommissioned Catholic church in Hull, MA. Phase I: was New Orleans (and everything that entails).
https://www.amazon.com/Gerard-DiLeo/e/B00JE6LL2W/
email: [email protected]
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