We rocked you to sleep under
cushions of burnt frankincense,
your rosemary plum lips glowing
beneath the glass shutter,
as our warm, fluttering fingers
smoothed the polished edges of your velvet mahogany.
Odes of voices,
soft as the powdery scent of dried roses,
were wordlessly strung into
half-convinced rhapsodies of "but it was painless",
and as if from the fragmented lens of an abstract camera,
the pews streamed in, black and white, woven hushes,
broken ***** sighs,
as we poured through glazed photos of your enraptured memory lanes,
how you burst through black winter days like a firecracker,
your young blood
blossoming as a scarlet primrose
upon alabaster.
Our preacher (who once prayed for my cat which
then died and
said it was God's plan)
professes of your rapturous gaiety in the angels' hideaways,
but my aunt stopped preparing family meals without a husband,
and your wet sapphire eyes,
like the violet blankets of daffodil pods,
only glisten at us from shrouded, opalescent moons,
stray and far,
transfiguring into vacant mirrors,
shaded from reach.