After the Funeral by Alec Solomita

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After the Funeral

After the funeral, 
after the reception,
I almost started to hurry home
to tell you all about both,
and about your death:
 
How in the Home, you
were, as they say, surrounded
at the end by loved ones,
meaning me and Theresa
and Judi. But as well
by the aides and nurses 
who’d looked after you for two years --
how they hovered over you!
weeping like Giotto’s putti.
 
And at the burial (and of course
I forgive them for this), 
most speakers were at pains
to say you weren’t gone but
transmuted — into sunlight,
the song of birds, the sound of rain,
a thread in the web of the cosmos.
Or that you were in Paradise
reunited with the mother
you lost at 12. “She’s not gone,” they 
said, “She’s not gone but altered” 
 
When I got home, all the rooms
in the house were empty.

​

Alec Solomita is a critic, fiction writer, and poet. He’s published fiction in the The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, The Adirondack Review, and The Drum Literary Magazine (audio), among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal, and named a finalist by the Noctua Review. His poetry has appeared in Algebra of Owls, The Galway Review, The Blue Nib, Oddball Magazine, Poetica, and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. He lives in Massachusetts.

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