untitled (Alan S.)

Alan, when I should have been crying about you,
I wasn’t. It was suddenly my grandmother’s funeral—
The church looked the same, that one hymn… oh I wept.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel the sadness of your death, Alan.
You were young and cheated. It was just
That all I heard and felt reminded me of her death.
All that surrounded me, suddenly,
Shuddered and quaked in my bones so that a flood—
Him, her, them— all those dead and gone came over me.
In that instant, I saw my friends, family,
at my funeral, and I witnessed them weeping. I realized they too
May be crying for someone else.