When Death meets Birth..
By: Christel Janssen
Tags: Consciousness, Death, Love, Birth, Resistance Poetry

And now. ..This strange death of yours

That makes me cringe

Makes me crave saltiness

Yet stay away from water

It dries me out

Yet now, you whisper softly in my ear, with your breath still warm:

“I’ll take you on a journey through water”

In all those weeks after your passing

I enter the water of your pain

The blanket of tears that first night

A strangely comforting blanket

The frozen hands reaching back out of the fire

The droplets of mist surrounding you

“I ascend the stairs of the river’s mouth” you said

Taking the shape of water, what ever it fills

And the oar descends toward the deep

Water is the only thing you could blame to keep you on earth

You tell me when you wake me up every night at 3

You the waterman

How strangely bizarre this big resolution

A strange urge to stay on this blue planet

For three days straight now

You have been a shrimp

A shrimp in fetus position

Still a little bit the body I recognize

I don’t know if I could call you by the same name

An amazing opening of curtains

A dance between the veils

as mystery has its tentacles around your body

Like octopus

And you take me with you

I cannot believe it

I rebuilt myself with coral and seaweed the bones of a fish

You told me three weeks ago

“There is a big hurry; I am going to be back”

I laughed: What??

While storm was blowing in kids and house and lands

and the whole community mourned

You said: I will be back

In a whole different form

We all will be back

We sang the blood deep song in the water

Because time is so perfect now, so perfect

As we emerge out of water

And now I zoom in on you

And feel you, I let myself feel you

And after seven weeks of storm, of drought, of splitting pain and hell and fire

And loss, and disappearing and dripping disasters after I saw you,

Now..

These minerals that are so you, are distilled, and shine

The bare bones that surface

Would anybody believe me?

But there is nobody to convince

there is only you in a vacuum

In other space

Yesterday was the 49th day of your death

the day of the big release

Finally exciting bardo

The either returning or floating forever in endless beyond

But your returning is not one of ancestors

Not one of children’s grief

Or setting things straight

Kicking children in butt

Or coming back to me

Here you are in seven weeks:

Embodied future

While humans mourn in past

I am excited, soo excited

this exploring

this intense hurry to go forward

Who? Who would have thought?

You so stuck in past

So stuck in stone, and building

And old cowboymovies

So attached to your long manes

And the old fashioned banjo-music that I hated

Now catapulted forward

Stripped from all identity

And you take me there

You take me there

Over that hump

Through the tiny hole

Through death straight into birth

Like a bird in a cage

You have to be so willing to open the door of that birdcage

And let the bird fly out

So willing to know that it may never come back

But so willing to know that it might as well

What a beautiful thing

That the love of that bird

And the love of that cage

And even the love between the bars

Is strong enough that it would come back on its own

Not because you forced it to be there

Not because you imprisoned it

But because it wanted to

As you jump over planets, and moons

and suns and solar systems

Over the other side of darkness

beyond the 360 degrees of earth

To love so deeply

And be soo free

Would you ever want any other type of love with anyone in your life?

Christel Janssen