What Remains Of You Poem by Xolani Majola

If today I closed my eyes and did not open them again,
would the world hold the shape of me, or simply swallow the rain?

Would they speak of the coat I wore, the title carved in stone,
the careful architecture of a life performed, but never known?

Death does not knock; it simply sits beside you, patient as a field,
and asks what you planted in the dark, not what you made the harvest yield.

Time is a river with a long memory; it carries what we throw,
and what we throw in haste, it drops; what we give with love, it keeps below.

Let Beauty answer first, she always does, adjusting her bright crown,
but Beauty is a season, she will come, and she will drown.

Let Wealth step forward, jingling like a gospel no one sings at graves,
for no coin has ever crossed that water, no vault outlasts its caves.

Memory walks the corridors of those you touched with open hands,
she lights her candles from the names of those who dared to understand.

I have seen mountains keep the silence of a man who never spoke of pain,
and rivers mourn a woman's passing by refusing to return from rain.

The ones who lasted were not loud; they burned like roots beneath the frost,
they gave their warmth into the cold, and called it nothing, called it lost.

What survives the grave is not the applause but the unwitnessed act,
the hand held in the corridor of grief, the faith that held the cracked.

So ask the soil what it remembers; it will say, not stone, not name,
but the quiet mercy of a life lived like a flame that lit another flame.