Awakening

With a heart, heavier than air,
I walk through days as if among the dead.
No event touches my soul,
teases my spirit, arouses my passion.
What difference this
from she who has passed on?
She who exited into the other realm
no longer walks the dead woman’s walk.
Can I bring life back to this spirit,
unshackle its weight by shedding its past,
tweak my soul telling it here we go?
And from within, can I measure out courage to change?
Death surrounds unless I do.
Resurrection, I promise myself, is today:
vitality and vibrancy become my new mantra.
Yes, today I will grow.
To know that each day
is an open page to fill,
to note the revelations of all I sense
and my human responses.
The bluest of sky, the dazzle of a blazen sun,
the richness of earth’s colors and all of its scents:
its golds, sea greens fragrant in it's salted air ,
and deepest soil browns heady in smell and moist to the hand.
Shouting away this pain caused by others, I live, I feel:
the wind as it tousles my hair,
the heat of the earth as it sooths my feet,
and the warmth of another soul who smiles in passing.
After all, the difference of she
who has crossed over into eternity’s other realm
and I is not so great:
She has awakened to a new life and I the same
Paulette Thibodeau-Baker