The Dead Don't Write. Poem by Tara Schley

Dying must be the easy part?
Not as hard as it seems.
It's living with a broken heart
Missing you,
that's the hardest part.

Going on with life.
Living with that void that was you.
And all I can do is listen
and read about death from the living.
Not the dead.
The dead don't write.

They don't sing the sad songs,
They don't star in the tragic movies.
They don't write the grief books.
They don't write the poems.
The living do.
And we living keep on living.

And the dead keep on dying.
In our dreams,
when for just a moment we forget
and then remember.
On birthdays and anniversaries
they keep on dying.

While we living keep on
listening to the songs,
reading the books,
watching the movies,
speaking the poems
at funerals, wrote
by someone who hasn't died,
trying to make sense of
death.

What a mean trick has been played on us humans,
to know we die.
Never living free
without that knowledge weighing us down.

We can't
fly like a robin,
or love like a dog,
nor dive to the depths like a whale.
Just living
and not really knowing about
death.
Knowing, just life.

A knowledge that keeps many of us from.
Loving;
Wholly.
Completely.

Oh, how I should have.
Not holding back,
loved you.
Like there was no death,
like a whale unaware it was making its last dive
into the deepest depths of an ocean.

Tara Schley