Prayer: Great Souls

When great souls die, the air becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws
on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.

Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us.
Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unuterrable
ignorance of dark, cold caves.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed. We can be.
Be, and be better. For they existed.