"Like the sky"

Here's what is on my mind lately. No surprise. It's about death. Sorry.

Over Everything

Carol Schiess

The dead do not leave us alone.

They trouble our waters,

speak their strange words

into our sleeping ears, urge us

to look back, stay back.

They appear, mirages, on our horizons,

stand in the way of forgetting,

of moving.  Oh yes, 
this is how it was, remember?

as if to say nothing can be good again

now they are gone, as if to say

we are lost without them.

Are we to blame? You may say so.

Perhaps they wouldn't come at all

if we did not call them,

bring them.  It's all in the mind,

you say.  But I know

they also come unbidden.

It would be different, of course,

if they really came, in the flesh.

That is all we want.

*     *     *

And this, from my husband's missionary journal, September 20, 1961, when he had just been made Montevideo district president. 

His underlining.

Our knowledge is worth no more than the good it does in the lives of those with whom we share it.

This was his thought as he prepared to teach 6 new elders and 2 new sisters who had just arrived in Montevideo. I like it. I like him.