Culture Thursday: Long Past My Death, in the Other World

Happy second day of 2025!

Here's another poem I wrote a while back, in 2017. As I grow older, I think more about what I'll leave behind, and to whom, and who will replace me. These are some thoughts on those themes.

***

Long past my death,

        In the other world I won’t see

beauty will live on.

        Someone will put on

a recording of 

        The Lark Ascending

and the strings will pull

        at their strings, taking them

somewhere they didn’t know

       existed. Our deaths may

make one think we’re solitary,

        a blip in time. And we are.

We are also continuous,

        each of us one link in a chain

stretching back to that Eve—

        not the one of which

the mythologies speak, but

        the Eve who is mother of

us all, the one from whom

        we all descend. We are not

solitary. We are a continuum,

        one soul feeding other souls,

taking in you and you and me.

        We are not islands, but a 

large mass, one great land,

        an ecosystem which sustains

itself, even when faced with death.

        Long past my passing,

my progeny will play 

        The Lark Ascending, 

and see that they are not alone,

        but stand, if not on the 

shoulders of giants, then on the

        shoulders of those who give them

a leg up, just a shove,

        to see a bit further.