Page 104 - Contrast2015

Alexandra Seiler

there ought to have been
a choir chanting. (kyrie
eleison, christe
eleison.) there ought to have been
mourners, women draped in black
and wailing, singing out his deeds
so the world would know what it had lost.
there ought to have been
white lilies, strewn across the floor,
and ivory and silk,
a marble mausoleum—
a memorial weathered,
not broken; changed, not destroyed,
by the passage of time.

but don quixote died long before
the day he signed his will and breathed his last;
nobody noticed. they buried a man named
alonso quijana, in a modest wooden box
in the churchyard cemetery,
a little rough-hewn wooden cross to mark the spot.
don quixote went unmourned,
all but forgotten, disappeared and
drifting in the atmosphere.

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