If only some ancestor did not think up the words: God, gods, prophets, messengers from the au-delà, would not life be easier to bear?

Quail not at Death’s door if you wrought no wilful harm

Quail not at Death’s door if you wrought no wilful harm
Should turning back in vengeance be the Dead Man’s qualm
Though even as the end nears the comfort of proffered pardon
Will in no way replace the sacrifices to expunge the burden

Sure everyone wreaks harm by chance or through ignorance
During those moments when control depends on circumstance
The way the chips fall is not a matter for individual call
Is not that the way centillions of quarks knock into it all

Do the Dead turn back to set right their splintered houses
Or do the worlds keep spinning guided by original causes
Tell not the man whose wits desert him what’s really wrong
The punishment the Dead incur is a judgement well foregone

He who turns self-righteously around to avenge or to meddle
To set right the world’s injustices in the Manichean treadle
Might earn himself a life’s sentence to roam all over again
Dead people walking numb through friendless terrain

All they may be able to do is to warn you of a fiddle
Of some danger sapping your strength the key to a riddle
Even if friends and relatives who betrayed your confidence
Will cling to spurious justifications ever through repentance

Think not of the lives milling lost in the neck of your clouds
Is there no end to ramifications vilifications in livelihoods
Do the Dead take along with them the history of their lives
And in which distant sibling planet are they stored in archives

If only it were as easy as to look up and wish them all away
What good can this earth be with us all dead in it anyway
Bickering for pieces of molten land pieces of names in decay
Metals and rock on fire hurtling down minuscule Milky Way

What need has the Maker for such a vast and roving Empire
Even children give up playing with trains and coaches on fire
Do the Dead renew passports before entering galactic spaces
Or do they coddle up in comfort in inalienable birth-places

Wouldn’t our world be some thing else but for this baffling secret
The foregone fate of earth-born gods if it weren’t for this regret.

© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014