From my rotting body
flowers shall grow
and I am in them
and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch
Eternity
he
who holds to himself
a joy
doth
the winged life
destroy
he
who kisses the joy
as it flies
lives in eternity's
sunrise
William Blake
Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
That sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm
I've heard it in the chillest land
and on the strangest sea
Yet never in extremity
it asked a crumb of me.
Emily Dickinson
Immortality
Do not stand by my grave and weep -
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am the thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints in snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain
As you wake with morning's hush
I am the soft up-flinging rush
Or quiet birds in circling flight
I am the day transcending night
Do not stand by my grave and cry -
I am not there, I did not die.
Clare Harner, 1934
These days I think I owe my life
to flowers that were left here by my mother;
Ain't that like them?
Gifting life to you again?
This life lived mostly underground,
unknowing neither sight nor sound
'til reaching up for sunlight
just to be ripped out by the stem.
Sensing only now it's dying,
Drying out then drowning blindly,
blooming forth its every colour
in the moments it has left
To share a space with simple living things,
infinitely suffering
but fighting off, like all creation,
the absence of itself.
A Hozier Byrne