Seraph

Slow embargo, I won’t let it run.
New and sweet as sorrel-
Meet the climbing core.
Seraph, cosy in my collarbone.
Seraph, no more the lightening law.

I wish you would have let on
So I could have bet on red to come up
And cycle through the melting steel to cold coal.

Are you on my shoulder now?
I stood beneath you, tall as the sky.
Can I sit upon a lotus,
Folded like a flush, seraph?

This outfit’s stained because the rain’s falling from the floor.
Toeing the lines of the market and running up the score.
Furnished with the thistles coming to the fore.

Rolling in the grass, giving up a glance,
Holding on a hope (at last!).
Climb on up the pass
And live to find the last.
Tell them when they ask…

Next time when you send me out of my mind
You can let me find it out for myself.
Bowled along, if I end up on the wrong rung,
You can let me find it out for myself.

It’s soothing to think of someone you’ve lost as the angel on your shoulder, as a connection to something which is huge and universal and mostly inaccessible when you’re alive. A close death makes you consider mortality a lot, and religion and spirituality and legacy and hope. It’s given me a sense of the inevitable which is strangely comforting (Comfier John), and a realisation that we all do just get on with it, don’t we?

But who gave you an axe to grind? Who gave you a path to find? Who gave you a row to hoe? Who gave you your sorrow? And who gave you the break of dawn, a pleasure just to look upon? Who gave you a barn to build and an empty page to fill?“

– Anais Mitchell, He Did