Leaving ... Finding the Way

As for those who leave
everything we know
to walk the paths of forgetting,
what do they leave
behind them when they go?

Memories, certainly, for those of us
who stay - their presence
in our sense of who we are,
what we did with them and they with us;

Their deeds that continue in the world
they left, that chain of cause and effect
that death can never break;

Their presence in a universe where they
will always dwell, though identity
shifts and re-assigns cell by cell

because, though lives are lost,
Life always finds the way.

End Game

‘This is the end-game’, he said
sitting up in the ward for the last time
still a chess player making his last moves
routinely as the game played out
beyond any strategy he had left.
The stethoscoped referee, days later,
marked his sheet, making it clear
that this was a detail she had little time for.

The registrar read over these notes and frowned,
thought himself unable to record the result,
considering the moves invalid or wrongly noted,
but consulted, and only then reluctantly decided
with disapproval to make it possible
to hold a funeral. It was indeed a game

of endings played by rules
that changed with each move
and official dignity maintained
for all but the captured king.