For the Dead Among Us

by Lisa Suhair Majaj


We will open the day for you,
and the night. We know
that you are beneath the earth,
or ash on the wind. But in
some space or time you still
live. Even as funeral bells
clang and the priest swings
the incense, the heart remembers
how to open. We will invite you
to the table to eat. We will light candles
on our mantlepieces and in
our hearts. We do not know
what messages of light and smoke
will reach you, but we will keep
sending them. We will keep you alive
in our longing, in our breath.
We will sing with you, together
in a space of music, even if you never
sang in life. Love finds a way.
It is not linear, with a destination,
a closure. Love starts over and over,
circling back to the source, the way
two people lose and find each other
repeatedly, but when they look
into each other’s eyes they see
each other—the light of recognition
that makes the world whole.


* * * * *

"For the Dead Among Us" was previously published in Adi Magazine (November 1, 2023).

Lisa Suhair Majaj is author of Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press Poetry Prize winner) and two children’s books, as well as creative nonfiction and literary analysis. Her writing has been widely published and translated into several languages, and appears in different venues, including the 2016 exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East (Harn Museum of Art). She lives in Cyprus.