AIR

The God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,

he learned as part of his youthful catechism

but now at eighty, breathlessly awaiting cataclysm,

he wonders if He also weeps

as he does, in the early hours awake,

scorned by the darkness, choked by panic,

impotent in a dream of drowning, frantic,

gasping, ‘What step, O God, to take’?

He was an engineer and knew what ticked,

worked on tall buildings, watched his wife

as her motor neurones lost their life

thirty years ago, saw her slacken, food stick.

The irony was not lost on him that both

she, no muscles, and he, no lungs or air,

were united in a book of common prayer.

A unifying recitation, welcome death.

Clouds of incense smoke at his funeral mass

embrace the word and prayers.

“He was never one to give himself airs,”

the priest says, and Freud lets the moment pass.