Circle of the Remembered

For Friends who Died too Soon

I'd stored the photo long years back.
It belongs to a summer before the plague
burned you away.  It shows you five
playing volleyball on the beach.

I watched you shrivel with age
forty years too soon, and die distorted,
like sheets of paper curled to ash
in a fire.  That's how I remembered you,
your faces pillowed on plastic tubes,
your eyes staring at a void.  I'd forgotten
you played ball on a beach that summer.

Next Poem:  "First Funeral"
List of Poem Circles
Updated last on:  2001/05/24