Author Information
The Disbeliever Imagines Death's 'Afterness'
When, from this brief life, I have disappeared,
taken into that Absence all have feared;
and, likewise, all who knew me---also gone
what grim conclusion will scholars have drawn
in some indelicate and future age?
My name and dates carved on some weather stone's
face, and beneath it, a box of bared bones;
some mention on my thoughts upon a page?---
these, they will say, "have not quite documented
sufficient evidence that he existed;
but, rather, that fictions of him persisted,
preserved and passed through time by wishful thinking
long after his decomposition's stinking
stopped, and time's epochs have fully prevented
him from having more than a character's
conception processed by myth's poetry
to offer comfort to some followers
whose lives may then proceed more comfortably."
