Breathing

By William P. Meyers

Death allowed him to breath.
He had thought breathing was about life,
That death was suffocation,
Like being underwater, lungs pained,
Thrashing for the surface.
Or choked with pneumonia
Each breath a labor of Hercules.

He recalled being strangled by his brother
The ultimate gambit in his bid
To capture all the rare drops of parental affection.
Transformed, he wondered at breathing.
Not petty lung fulls of air,
But an entire ocean,
An entire atmosphere,
An entire galaxy.

The very past,
That unending strata of composted time
That brings forth the living present
And mates with the future.

Copyright 2014 by William P. Meyers, all rights reserved