Requiem
For
Edie
The door opens on Tuesday.
On Friday she walks away from the world.
I saw them at the Symphony,
Brahms and one hundred voices around them.
He was wearing a black suit with a top hat,
she in a long silk evening gown,
his arm softly around her shoulder.
They waved at me from a high window
and then they walked into the stars.
Nobody else could see them
but they waved at me
from a high box in the air.
In the fortissimo,
low pedal tones of the organ
vibrated the ceiling and the walls,
and in the quiet moments
one hundred voices hummed
the chord of the earth
as it turned.
In another world,
she is skating on a river
in the rose pink of sunset or dawn.
A fox fur hat around her face
keeps her warm, sheltering her
as a cottonwood tree from thunder.
These memories comfort as a soft pillow,
green and cool, a meadow
glowing with wild irises and daffodils,
the path through the forest where you walked,
where the leaves of your life
glow like rhapsodies at your feet.
— Diane Frank
