At the Grave of the Suicide

by Brett Rutherford

     For S.F.

O Beauty, O Beauty,
     O Beauty too good for the world,
how you do rob us by your removal!
What was the use of your death
except to those who stand and weep?
Who must, in one life,
fill, and refill the cup of grief,
so early, and so many times?

I come to your stone,
my exhortation useless,
the gifts I gave or would have given
refused or cast back by the grave.
What would I not have given to save you?

If only magic could bring you back,
I would sit here with ring and book
until the world collapsed
     into its core of iron,
until the loam of the soil parted
and your dark laughter exploded
the long-sealed vault below!

If only souls were immortal!
(The heart breaks, wishing it were so,
hoping to force from nature
what it cannot give)

The weighted stone,
the too-deep water,
the ignominy of a found body,
the pointless inquest,
the baffled, pained, guilty faces
of the left-behind.

The poem you earned
is not the one
I wanted to give.