Building The Shrine Poem by Sheila Burns

How do we honor and love
Our formless, beloved, departed ones?
Those whose eyes we loved
Whose lips, smiles, skin, voice, smell, touch,
Sound, laughter brought
So much joy and love to us
Until they were gone
Whose bodies now are lifeless
Beyond our sight
Memorialized only by
Photos, tokens,
Some cold engraved stone
Or perhaps transformed by fire
Into smoke and ash.
To have nothing else physical of them
No breath, no sound or stroke
To love the departed in spirit alone
Breaks our hearts apart
Cracks our minds
Enflames our guts
Transfers our psyches
To unknown realms
Where we can only feel lost
Until through and with our forlornness
We find we have built a temple
Within ourselves where we
Love and honor the now formless one
In spirit.
And we find that not hurting,
But laughing and loving
And feeling alive again ourselves
Does not mean forgetting
But whispers to us that we have taken
The love of our beloved
Now formless one
Enshrined it within
And in the making of
That holy grotto, that sacred altar
Built with the salt of our tears
The ache of our heart
The memories of both good & ill
And the fissures of foundations forms
We learned to love the formless
In spirit
And our formless spirit is satisfied
As our starving senses can never be.
And our satisfied spirit
Manifests life again loving and losing
Other forms
Manifesting laughter and joy,
Tears and sorrow
Hurting and crying
Catching our breaths
In moments of beauty
All the while
We revere the departed
With the deep silent
perpetual devotion
of
Living
In Spirit

(April 2004)