We Visit the Kingdom of Death by Cecil Morris

After a long illness, our daughter climbed

on morphine and drifted across to death.

We followed her to beg for her return

but we, neither of us, were Orpheus.

We had no instrument to play, no song,

no music to shake God with our hot grief,

to stir him from his steady indifference,

to win back our sleeping girl from his night.

We could only wail, just two more in crowd

of supplicants clamoring for mercy,

our voices lost as plain dusky-winged moths

around a porch light or fire pit, and god

stayed hidden in his blaze of white light

until we gave up and, walking backwards,

climbed our way out of his kingdom of death.

Bio

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching English, and now he tries writing what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) enjoy. He has had a handful of poems published in Cimarron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Midwest Quarterly, Poem, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.

Author's note

I spent many years teaching high school English, and, in that role, I often asked students to write poems. When we read Oedipus Rex or Antigone, we also read a few Greek myths, and I would ask students to use imagery or events from those myths to make their own poems. I usually demonstrated what I wanted them to do by writing a poem sparked by a myth myself. When our daughter passed a few years ago, I thought about Orpheus and his attempt to bring Eurydice back from the underworld. Those thoughts led to this poem.