[Authors Note:

This is part 2 in a series about the wonders that await us after death, part 1 can be found here. To all of my subscribers and to any who’ve made positive comments here or elsewhere or have supported this work, you have my sincerest gratitude. The first poem is a collection poems bridged by me with minor changes, contact me if references are needed.]

A River Flows in You (Among the Most Beautiful Piano Songs)

He Met Her When the World Began…Or was it last July?

Once there was a boy who gave a girl twelve roses. Eleven of them were real, one was plastic. Then he told her he will love her until the last one dies.

It was a promise he never took back.

But then one horrible day she died instead, and as her absence filled his world, he begged:

If tears could build a stairway,
and memories a lane,
I'd march right up to heaven
and bring you home again.

But no matter the depth of his grief, no such stairway ever appeared. As the years trickled by ever so painfully, on occasion he would wake up feeling fine.

Then he’d remember.

As the breaking wheel of time turned and his youth and hope fled him he went to her garden:

An old man kneeling all alone
Plants a plastic rose in a garden of stone
For seventy years now she's been gone
But his devotion is still going strong

She looked down and her heart was lost.

She whispered:

Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am diamond glints on snow.
I am sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awake and greet the dawn
I am the day as it is born
I am birds in circling flight
I am the soft starlight at night
Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there.

I did not die.

He looked up with a lighter heart and sighed, “thank you”. After seventy years his loneliness finally fled him. He was no longer kneeling all alone. Her presence filled his world.

He retrieved her rose and renewed his promise.