It is the living who cannot

It is the living who cannot
live without the dead,
who wish them
back,
who need their presences,
their hands,
as Orpheus
held her hand, Eurydice’s,
to lead her
back to earth out of
the gulf of Hades,
as I
need yours
It is not so much
the dead
who need us
now
(as we think they do)
& that reconciliation
we long for, that knowledge
of each other to the uttermost,
which could assuage us,
they are
one step beyond it & suffer us
to long for them.
If they could
return, it would be out of
patience with us merely: their need to
console us. For somehow an indifference
possesses them, for all their tenderness
& they see beyond us,
even if
what they see seems to us
nothing

-Hilda Morley