After the lord of the dark world carried her away, she was never
again the gay young creature who had played in the flowery meadow
without a thought of care or trouble. She did indeed rise from the
dead every spring, but she brought with her the memory of where she
had come from; with all her bright beauty, there was something
strange and awesome about her. She was often said to be “the maiden
whose name may not be spoken.”
—Edith Hamilton, in Mythology

Mother, I had a vision of you:
in what distant future did I see
your body shrouded in light,
jewelled and dusted in light?

A premonition, I thought,
of a future I’d have no part of,
where death overtook love
and love was powerless

 
to draw the loved one back.
For years I never spoke of it,
but now you lie in a room
that is not a room,

 
neither crypt nor tomb,
your body mapped with lines
and X’s that guide the x-ray light
to seek out what is dark, malign.

 
A door closes between us,
and I see you captured
on a screen, in still repose:
my vision carried all these years!

 
A hand twirls a dial, a whir
for a few brief seconds, light
piercing through you, then silence.
With a click, the door opens

 
and you are given back—
you pass back through the door!—
something the dead cannot do
so I know you cannot be dead.

You return, as once a daughter
passed from a dark underworld
back into her mother’s arms
(but I am daughter here, not you),

 
how gratefully she passed back.
I see them standing in a field
at noon, the light too bright
to bear, no shadows anywhere.

 
What do they hear? They hear
the birds, the wind, the brook.
And Nature says what it always
says, what always remains unheard:

 
Happiness is fleet. Like water running
over stones, the words repeat:
Happiness is fleet, is fleet, is fleet …
Or do they imagine it so?