Silent

I have to confess I am interested in death
In part because I have seen so little of it,
At least of intimately human varieties.

Here's the complete list. Please feel free to mock as you please.
When I was nine I was told my grandmother had died.
I had last seen her, frightfully soulless, months ago.

The mother of a classmate I barely knew came next.
In neither case did I see the dying, nor the flesh
Laid out with pancake makeup in a satined coffin.

That I didn't witness until my grandfather's death,
Which I also missed, by then aged twenty-seven.
At his open-casket funeral, I studied him.

I could continue in this way, case by sorry case.
All told, I failed to be in the room for the last breaths
Of all grandparents, both parents, even my brother.

If you've never watched the needle push through skin to vein,
Have you ever given blood, ever been injected?
Death has danced its tango, all around me, close to me,

But I have never caught its eyes, watched its human face.
Its inhuman face, now that's another animal.
I've seen the deaths of plants and beasts again and again.

My mother, born already orphaned on a small farm,
Saw those deaths and all manner of human ones as well,

The babies dying in her arms in Nigeria,
The patients in the terminal oncology wards
In Miami and New York, the aged, demented

Denizens of nursing homes she worked in at night,
The HIV ward she worked in the 1980s.
I only ever saw living humans souls had left.

Still, I am curious. Death and rumors of death
I have always had with me, but while the cloud rains round,
I wonder, when it reaches me will it make a sound?