Mourning

The children died quickly in the last plague.
All we had left of our son was the portrait
we’d commissioned before we buried him.
Those big eyes follow me around the room
as I sweep or prepare the evening meal.

They are not his eyes. They’re the ones
he has now, eyes that sweep across Elysium
or Heaven, depending on whether you ask me
or his father, who has taken up that newfangled
god incarnate. What I know is that our boy is

gone and nothing, no mere man on a cross,
resurrected or not, nor the old gods of my youth
can bring him back: I cannot speak his name, will
not unsettle the spirit behind those painted irises.