I am drawing toward the light.
I am crossing to a far shore
Where familiar figures are waiting.
I am free of pain.
I am floating above my body.
I am zooming around space.
I can go wherever I want.
I turn my eyes to Earth
And the next thing I know,
I am in a long tunnel or corridor.
There is a light at the end.
Oh my god I think,
I am going to be born again!
Now I am back in my body.
I am passing through the rooms of an old derelict house
Where the wood is rotten, the ceilings sagging.
I sense the presence of a ghost.
I am in an old building, working at something
Some kind of contraption
That makes meals for people.
I'ts very complicated with many tiny parts.
I'm almost finished.
The work is beneath me
I have done it before.
I can't say no
I finish and the machine begins
Slowly making meals.
Now I am lost in a city
Without my phone.
Not again!
Where is this?
Why am I here?
I recognize a street that deadends at a park.
I am with strangers,
We seem to be in mourning,
Walking with our heads down.
I can't sleep.
I sleep.
I wake.
I sleep.
I wake.
It is raining.
I sleep.
It is raining.
I hear an explosion.
A bomb goes off somewhere.
Someone cries out,
The war has begun.
I am hiding in a basement.
The soldiers break in and put us in trucks.
I recognize some of the other prisoners.
Someone looks like my father.
Some people look like they have been tortured.
They walk around like zombies.
I go up to a man who looks a little like my brother.
How long have you been here, I ask.
He looks at me and I see his mouth is sewn shut.
I feel sick.
Everyone is weak from hunger.
Now we are on a ship.
The ship has been abandoned.
We are drifting.
But the children are very happy and singing.
There is a young woman giving everyone flowers.
I wake
And make some coffee.
I watch a boat go by in the canal.
It is blue with a white canopy.
The V of its gentle wake
Widens in a series of waves
That dissipate with perfect symmetry
On the near and far shore.
.........
I am pretty much completely happy with this poem which is very unusual. Albeit, it isn't the poem I intended to write. Somewhere way in the back of my mind I had an idea that I was going to be able to make a case for how life is just a long version of a near death experience, with different kinds of crossings and out of body experiences and approaching distant shores, adopting the attitude that the older we get the more the people we meet are the people we are supposed to meet, even the ones far away are familiar, like when we are walking down a long beach with people in the distance. Those people, as they come into focus will look just as we thought they might look, so we are always and ever somehow arriving, letting in more and more light, until when we die, it won't be darkness that greets us, but the source of all light. But that poem was not to be written and what I got instead was instant re-embodiment, reincarnation with little or no time to enjoy the transcendent dimension of the afterlife.
The world isn't finished, the human race isn't finished, and until it is, I am going to keep getting reassigned to samsara, the cycle of birth and death and rebirth. The image of the little blue boat with the white canopy traveling down the middle of the canal, leaving the symmetrical wake, may be symbolic of the poem I intended to write, the boat to the afterlife. But I am not on that boat . . . yet.
(Article changed on Apr 29, 2022 at 1:33 PM EDT)
