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The Funeral

He remembered feeling sick with fear. She had been breathing with difficulty, the air making a rasping sound in her throat. She sounded different — almost impolite. Sounds that used to mean Nana were the floating notes of her harpsichord, the soft rustle of the pages she turned in story books, songs half hummed half whispered, and the small clicking of her knitting needles.

Selected Poems

Mirrors

The Poetry Of Pamela Perkins Atkinson

There Is A Place Where You Are Not Alone

“Rely on yourself” and “Do not rely on yourself” alone are not conflicting ideas. One must rely on what he is, but what he is is not alone.

Seth On Suicide

Seth’s oceanic desire is to remind us that no death comes unbidden, that death is as spontaneous a creation as our own lives, engineered by our beliefs, which, no matter how distorted, cannot destroy in some final deed of discipline the impulse to be.

Selected Poems

Learning To Die

In every spiritual tradition life is not something that you automatically have, it is something that you must choose, and what makes you choose life is the challenge of death — learning to die, not eventually, but here and now.

The Every-Other-Friday-Afternoon Bridge Luncheon

As far as I know, my grandmother’s only regret in life was that she died on a Thursday. “Damnation!” she cursed fate in front of her sister Gert, her four children, and her thirteen grandchildren.

Selected Poems

Prepare To Die

It’s an ongoing process of opening to life. The more you open to life, the less death becomes the enemy. When you start using death as a means of focusing on life, then everything becomes just as it is, just this moment, an extraordinary opportunity to be really alive.