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Discussed: death
Dharma
The old man had to catch Dharma twice,
chasing the black cat around his front yard
full of nettles, scrap metal, and ten other
cats (two of them also black). It took him
an hour, we paid him the hundred bucks.
Then three of us had to slide the wriggling cat
into the carrier bag, only for it
to exit through the other open end
(alas, no one had checked). The old man, breathless,
glared at us, swore, chased the cat again...
We’ve had Dharma for three years now. Sometimes,
we wonder whether the old man had caught
the same cat once more, that the true Dharma
might still be there, sleeping rough in a junkyard.
‘The Family’ (Egon Schiele, 1918)
When the last cartload of the dead
has been buried, we are left with images.
Here, both the father and the mother
are naked. We see Egon at the top of the frame,
sitting on a tattered sofa, his body yellowed
as if by fever. His wife Edith is crouched on the floor,
eyes vacant and skin pale, almost shimmering,
while cradling an infant on her lap. Only the artist
gazes back at us, a hand on his heart
as though in mid-gesture. Like the Old Testament prophet,
he seems to foretell his family’s fate, one that ends
in an unknown manger. The year was 1918,
he was twenty-eight, on the cusp of artistic greatness,
his works revered by friends and the public.
This one, however, he would not finish:
later that same year Edith will die of the flu
at twenty-five while six months pregnant,
and after three days, Egon himself will pass away.
The boy in the painting will not be born. And yet
here he is before us like a promised firstborn,
a vanished messiah we now strangely behold
a hundred years after.
Ragnarok
The ancient Norsemen knew
what our seers and philosophers deny:
on the day of the Great War,
the citadels of light will fall
to the armies of night.
In the west, wolves will devour the sun,
and in the east will die both the anguish
and the howl. Black flags will fly on hilltops,
skeletal horses dragging the severed heads
of those we used to call our gods.
There will be palm branches
to welcome the conquistador.
The dictator shall emerge from the mausoleum,
a star on his forehead, hatred falling
like cobwebs from his sleeves
and onto the marble. Medals will again
cover the general’s uniform,
the executioner clambering up and down
the platform, stairs grown slippery
from the relentless roll.
Every morning, we yawn at the headlines,
what’s new in the obituary
or the latest city that has been razed.
Hearts clear and unclouded on Sundays
at church, we light candles for gods
whose days are numbered.
Ronald Araña Atilano is a Filipino-born poet who lives in Awabakal land in Lake Macquarie, New South Wales. His works have been published in the Rabbit Poetry Journal, Westerly Magazine, Jacaranda Journal UQ, the Booranga Writers Centre’s fourW anthology and Spineless Wonders’ ‘Remnants’ Microlit anthology. His poem ‘The Fugitive’ was highly commended in the 2023 Hammond House International Literary Prize.
Locative Magazine 