My Mother's Death -- a sonnet

The Dead are Dead

Death was a wind and a flood.

It came in the night and it came in the light.

It broke the children and their parents, the mothers who smiled and the fathers who worked in the fields.

Death broke them and buried them and scattered dust over their graves and told a story about death and the road it takes to heaven.

The dead listened and wrote the stories down and kept them close to their hearts.

They knew a story is hope.

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The above is part of a sequence of poems called My Mother's Death -- a sonnet.  More of the poem appears at the James Franco Review.