Sonnet Toward an Exit
1 Minute Read Time
from The Antigone Sonnets
I asked for an ending and was given two.
One in bed and the other at the door, turning.
Antigone begins with a twofold blow and ends
with a cross-hilted sword, half its length lodged
in a body, and a knife clean with blood at an altar.
The consequence of refusing the dead a burial
and sentencing the living to a buried life.
In his last sermon, Donne calls this “posthume death”
or death after death. When what is past does not stay past.
When the same worm must be mother, sister, and self.
And so, Antigone wants to rescue her brother
from the vermiculation that is the common fate of the dead.
But my ambition is limited: to be wormlike,
eat, shit, move, fuck, die, and make good soil.
Read more from Issue 22.2.
