Learning to Die [2020]

I feared I had become

the thing I feared most.

What I was slipped away;

what I became slipped after it.

So what remained?

The darker rooms inside me,

the cupboards I’d bolted,

rushed for the throne

and wished to rule.

Yet I knelt —

my knees pressed into cold stone,

my head bowed low —

and I learned to die.

Learning — and still learning —

to die because You ask it of me.

Die to my old shape, die to its hunger;

die to the dark rooms, die to the false throne;

die to the world that taught me cunning, die to what I was.

And at last, after that dying,

to die like You:

to die to Death itself,

and to leave the tomb behind.