Martin Willitts Jr. - All Death is The Same Death / Disappearing Into a Ripple

All Death Is the Same Death

Yellow leaves migrate to the pond.

All death mixes in the end. 

There are no mourners. 

All settle into a painless future.

All empty their spirit,

turning pockets outward to show

they have turned themselves over to death.

Can love endure such loss?

Seasons continue to be physical and precise.

It is amazing the amount of effortlessness 

in which one eases into death. 

The white throat of October sobs leaves 

sinking to the bottom of the pond. 

All traditions of love and suffering are the same,

yet no two moments know the same pain of loss.

Disappearing Into a Ripple

1.

I can only watch as the white cells nesting in her 

become a time bomb. Where they go, 

they take the odor from ashen light. She coughs 

a rosary of blood. The seasonal moons in her vertebrate 

fire wrong messages. Like needlework,

small pebbles of her fingers comb out clumps

of pink hair and flaked scalp. This is the part 

where no hero rescues, and idly stands by.

2.

What in this world is unblemished? 

We can take the tempera paint to pale muscle

using blue metallic of damselflies, and the flesh 

will remain the color of dogwood flowers.

In the watershed, fallen trees are a part

of nature and casualty. Reeds are a resting place

for the brown sparrows.

None of this matters when death ripples.

In the center of an orb weaver’s web

sits a stitching goddess,

hunching over a caught beetle.

Sorrow is this entrapment.






Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 11 Pushcart and 11 Best of the Net awards. He provided his hands-on workshop “How to Make Origami Haiku Jumping Frogs” at the 2012 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award ; co-winner of the 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; winner of the 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; winner of the 2014 Broadsided award; winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest.