"Last Rites"
"Last Rites" honors Marshall Kenneth Kirk, my brilliant colleague and troubled, late friend, who might as well have penned this self-epitaph for "Serepta Mason" in Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915):
My life's blossom might have bloomed on all sides
Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals
On the side of me which you in the village could see.
From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
My flowering side you never saw!
Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed
Who do not know the ways of the wind
And the unseen forces
That govern the processes of life.
TITLE - "Last Rites (for Marshall)"
WHERE - Burnaby, B.C. (2015)