We fall into silence and through it
to end up with rib-cracking sighs
the size of a minnow or an inner
tube connecting the cosmos to sin.

We grunt as we board the boats shunting
the bodies of the people we were
to the other side widely imagined
as resembling a permanent state

of stasis in motion, a notion
hard to swallow now we are au fait.

‘I pass'd, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that sour ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.’
― William Shakespeare, Richard the Third, I. iv.