I often look at you.
You're dead yet more alive to me
Than the living, breathing corpses
I see daily.
I know you better than my mother.
I think about a conversation
That may have been between us.
How you may have looked,
Dressed in the finest cloth
Yet small and frightened
For all your smiles and bravado.
The shadow of the axe falling across your neck
Was there for years.
You fell into a sea of unfathomable depths
And you treaded water as long as you could
Yet everyone grows weary.
And you drowned.