Poisonous Poetry
The shell of the cicada;
It, scraping, caroled itself
Utterly away.
~ Bashō
Mourning over its
Dead body, over its shell;
The cicada’s voice.
~ Yayu
When I am just a heavy shell-like thing
Awaiting worms and dessication, will
Some part of me, as was, arise and sing
Of beauty? Will a praising paean spill
From what is left of me that hovers there
(Above my carcass that I can’t conceive
Of now) about the ecstasies more like a prayer
That filled me then. Will rapture’s verses heave
In passion from my soul’s dead, see-through lips
Because of love I knew with you, and you,
And you? No corpses think of rot-doomed hips
And all that sort of stuff. Will graveyard yew
Suck up a hint through roots of all my skills
In bed and make live greenness with lost thrills?
~ Phillip Whidden