Re-posting this poem with a recent note of elucidation to enlighten the unwary: somehow, it appears, it was deleted from the site... (like a couple of others)

Do the Dead see with their own eyes

for Thadchayani, my poetry-loving doctor sister : 28/08/1929 – 26/10/2014
-the « only » child of father’s begotten seven -


The Dead do not see with their own eyes
They shed their bodies back in old lives
Neither time nor place makes for barriers
Nor for holding back tears for their dears

Three or four days before bones they abandon
Grow cold underground or hot to the touch in oven
All the hurts and slights and the sordid details
That the unconscious buried under knotted pigtails

The world is theirs and all the rabid secrets
They who have a long long way to cover with regrets
Might they reveal what lies beyond our sights
The curtain abruptly drops behind to hasten their flights

None may turn back or cast a longing cowed look
At those they may have wronged or for profit forsook
Unless they take the oath of incurred punishment
Should they exceed the courtesy of just one moment

When they may arrest the attention of a loved one
Who instead of taking fright condones the unknown
The shared oneness of having been in the same womb
The frangipani freshness invading from au delŕ the tomb

Don’t they know everything and with what insistence
They mock at the folly of our measely existence
We who must soon join their other-worldly ranks
Where all is nothing and nothing’s so many pranks

They must play without ever disclosing their hand
For the bubble once pricked cannot be second-hand
In the silence of your thoughts and transporting reveries
A window opens into the turmoil of disrupting miseries

While you toil wrapped in the quiet of monotoned cobblers
The scent of cured leather singeing velvet antlers
The sudden wind rustling through an open paper basket
The crockery shifting positions beside the crooked casket

The book you’re reading tumbling out of your hands
Swarms of autumnal gnats electing to circle inlands
And without looking up you know you are the object
Of attention from an erstwhile ętre stopping by to check

Yet none may be so certain as to call it by name
The art of staying dead is the name of the game.

(NOTE: I feel I should add the following piece of information, for it might be of some interest or use to some should they be confronted by a similar predicament. The untoward happenings I described or hinted at in the poem, I must say, at first, rather « intrigued" me, and I was not quite sure how I should have reacted in the circumstances. I wished for a more concrete form of « manifestation » before I could have participated in the obvious « call to communication » with « whoever" it was who was wanting to « speak » to me during the four to five days before the Sunday, the day my sister expired. On that day, she was with me most of the morning and part of the afternoon and made her « presence" felt, first at my place when I was still in bed, and later in my car when I went out shopping. I’m not going to impart in any way what she actually said or did for such information must forcibly remain private. The very next day, I received an email message that my sister had passed away in Adelaide, Australia, and that she had been in a « coma" for two weeks prior to that Sunday.
She had already been to see someone "very close" to me before coming my way. From that Sunday onwards, I have had no further « visits" from her.)
July 20, 2019, Paris, France.


© T. Wignesan – Paris, November 3, 2014