Day forty-three

I was thinking about writing a poem about my grandmother. About how it felt to hold her ashes in a bronze urn shaped like a cube. How it felt to hold both my grandfather's and grandmother's ashes. The heaviness of the bronze and the texture of the metal. I even wanted to write about the Honpa Hongwanji (the Buddhist temple the ashes are housed at), But I couldn't come up with the right words. Is there a way to write about death without it being so sentimental? Death, I suppose, is arguably the central point of all poetry. Keats wrote in that poem about a Greek vase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty", but I think I like the phrasing "death is beauty, beauty death". Death seems to be the only constant that we know in life. I always go back to Philip Larkin's poem "Next, Please". I think the last stanza of the poem is the most powerful. "Only one ship is seeking us, a black- / Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back / A huge and birdless silence. In her wake / No waters breed or break". I suppose love is a form of death as well. Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote in her famous Portuguese poem, the one that's printed on millions of valentine's cards "I shall but love thee better after death". I'm not sure where I'm going with this. In short, I've been thinking about death lately. Not in a depressing way, but more in a curious fashion, as though I'm a researcher. I want to write a version of "The Divine Comedy" using the levels of hell/purgatory known in Buddhism as Naraka. Maybe one day it'll come to fruition. Whoever wrote this Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka_(Buddhism) ) has a great imagination. I'll have to do more research on the poster's description, evidently whoever wrote the article didn't know how spell "existence".

27:20