Stopped For Death Poem by Steve Woodward

When I die and am laid to rest
My bones will wait for you.
Will time or the ages ask in curiosity how each one fit alongside yours
On those easy nights where breezes lapped across our forms
The stars like pinholes in a royal blue sky.

When my fingers are knitted between bed roots
Will the flowers ask how they once danced across pages of love notes
Or how they, like intrepid explorers
Ran like rivers across your mountains and through your valleys
How they traced the growing lines of our faces before they came to rest.

When my heart is brown and food for worms
Will they ask of their meal how it beat for you?
Once it sizzled like a snare upon seeing you
And fluttered like a nervous child when I held you near
Until a life of love later – it paused to catch its breath.
And finally stopped for death.