Gloria Mundi
​
Come to my funeral dressed as you 
would for an autumn walk in the woods. 

Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission 
to be late, even without good cause. 

If my day arrives when you had other plans, please 
proceed with them instead. Celebrate me 

there—keep dancing. Tend your gardens. Live 
well. Don’t stop. Think of me forever assigned 

to a period, a place, a people. Remember me 
in stories—not the first time we met, not the last, 

a time in between. Our moment here is small. 
I am too—a worldly thing among worldly things—

one part per seven billion. Make me smaller still. 
Repurpose my body. Mix me with soil and seed, 

compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful, 
wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow 

and decay, let me be lovely yet 
temporal, like memories, like mahogany.
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