Sonnet CCXXIV

I’m dressed in black. Around me, snowflakes glisten white.
The mourners, raven-black, hack at the garbage bags
and cry with bird-like yells, the vulgate of those hags.
Obsessive in their grief and maddened in their plight,
they tear the bags, sparagmos seeming dull and trite.
Then bowels and the innards, inner guts like rags,
float mutely in the breeze, as do their wicked hags,
enchanted by their sadness, lifted by their might.

Whose funeral is this? I ask as to the church
my leaden feet upheave the snow, in frenzied search.

It’s mine. I’ve lost myself. What’s old has died away,
the manumission signed with death and caused by change.
Still hesitant, I wonder if I should derange
the past. And mourning loss, I drift unto my day.