When The Dead Were Only Dying Poem by Andrew Quin

They loved, as loudly as the dead have slept
Yet unafraid, not knowing fear;
Becoming of a calm unknown to those who wept
And loveless stand still weeping by the graves
And long-abandoned rooms and wombs
Wrought barren by the distance
[Drowning dulls the bone]
As tall as man, when upright raves
Until his last, and falls alone.

They loved, as we had lived and loved before,
Upstanding as the stone for spine
That scribes its line lamenting those who stand no more;
As lovers we shall lie as they now lie;
Live, and love, and live again,
To be a still-wet still-life of the cells
That pulls away loves' mask and sighs:
In others arms, asylum dwells.

We loved, as they still long to love, and on
Into the permanence of Death
And past the dead end of a breath expiring on
Into the gentleness of nowheres' depths:
But see. Love is life, immune to deaths' inquiry;
There is no death 'til love has gone.
Those that were loved have died no death,
And because they were loved, live on.