Elegiac Feather Song

Painting by Kirby Sattler


Elegiac Feather Song

Forty years ago
while attending the funeral
of my infant nephew,
dead of SIDS, recipient of only
a few weeks in this life,
after I struggled with seeing
the infant’s white casket,
like a gilded boot box,
I flashed on the image of an Indian graveyard
where bodies are wrapped in soft animal skins,
placed up high on stanchions of pine
away from wolves and worms,
and there taking its place among the elders
was this tiny body no bigger than a rag doll
on its perch of sticks, swathed in white buckskin,
and I ached with the mystery
of karmic inevitability
as I thanked Marc
for fulfilling his spiritual contract with our group,
bathing each of us
in white-hot blessed emotions.

Glenn Buttkus

May 2011

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