Four Moths

Coming from a debate about what we perceive as God, and how whether He or She is dead or isn't supposed to matter does not negate the fact that He or She must have existed on some plane.

Four moths descended on a lamp

The day that my mother died.

When her brittle hand crashed

Like a kamikaze pilot

To the floor,

It echoed through the house

The way that you would hear

If you were there for the atomic bomb.

We buried her on a Sunday,

A thick layer of rosaries

Wrapped around her pale wrist,

Because to bury my mother

Without her god, God, god,

Is a sin she'd never forgive.

The first moth dove down

As my father scattered dirt

Clump by unending clump

Onto the pure mahogany,

His face stone and stolen,

Only giving way with the occasional tic in his jaw.

It was my turn then,

To cover the box with earth

And watch the second moth

Pull back from the flame,

Only to be devoured again from the legs up,

Quivering and looking to his fellows,

Who failed to see him struggle

In the light of the lamp that still consumed them.

The procession rose,

Dropping one by one white lilies

Into my mother pit,

Along with the animal blood

Leaking out of moth three,

And we could almost hear him sigh

Of despair when the last flower fell.

They swarmed to my father and me

While the last moth succumbed,

Arms, hands, fingers, bodies

Thicker than smoke and twice as invasive

Swallowing us,

Swallowing it,

And now that I’m grown I wonder

Why one man’s singular crisis,

His existential suffering

Frightens so many?

Author's Note

Please review, thanks :)

Reviews

[darkabyss]

That's and eternal battle to find reason behind sorrow and suffering very well written