Yesterday, my professor asked us to write a poem about something/someone we would like to accompany. Given that it is a class about the performance of accompaniment (seeing someone through their journey, wherever and whatever that may be), I wrote a poem about accompanying someone to the afterworld. I see afterworld/afterlife as a state of being and an actual place. We are sometimes divorced from things in our lives that forces us to start anew, and that can be an afterworld/life. Death is of course a transition to somewhere that many of us cannot see yet, but that is also an afterlife/world. I hope you enjoy the poem below:
I'd rather you take my hand and urge me in the direction you want to go
Rather than give me a piece of paper, plastic, or anything else that "proves" you're here and you belong
You'd pay me nothing and it would cost you nothing
I'd show you between here and there and everywhere
This would take as long as you needed, and as wide as you'd want to go
Distance is constructed
Time is constructed
Your journey is not
We'd be formless if you'd like
Always already changing (past, present, future)
We'd glow with admiration and shiver with uncontainable excitement
We'd see the land that everyone talked about as being "promised"
The lush greens, blues, pinks, purple, oranges, yellows would coat the skies and underpasses
The lush blacks and browns would shape our bodies in the book of forever
We'd smile to each other and feel immortal
At the end of our time, as we feel it rather than know it because time is in our body and not a gadget we put on it
I'd let go of your hand you'd move how you saw fit
I'd go back for others that you hold dear
I'd bring them directly to you
We'd part and I'd cry tears, overflowing and flooded with memory
Not because you weren't mine
But because you finally found what was yours to have.