Afterlife

Sarah Meehan

Because no one else fits into them,

I inherit my grandmother’s clothes:

skirts with waists so narrow

I can’t wear them after lunch,

sheer blouses, embroidered collars,

silk buttons, puffed sleeves.

As a child, when they told me

the meek would inherit the earth,

I thought they said the week,

as though the smallest cycle of days

would rule

the vastest of kingdoms,

gleaning the meaning

if not the wording.

What’s left

to inherit now

that the earth’s drawers are emptying

of corals, insects, birds? For my daughter,

I gather cicada shells, butterflies

in jars, dandelions gone to seed—

small, dead things,

the precious little we pass on.

Into them

she slides life,

dancing the cicadas, drawing the butterflies

reincarnated as caterpillars,

blowing the seeds and now, twirling

in her great-grandmother’s clothes,

laughing at the overflowing fabric

flapping around her bear-cub body—

is this what it means to believe

in afterlives, second chances,

the world going on in new forms

without us? I want to tell her

I’ll give her an earth as large and full

as the one I imagined as a child,

but she’s tripping on the hem

of the clean cream blouse,

rising and falling

and rising again.

SARAH MEEHAN lives and writes amongst the creeks and mountains of Jinibara land (Sunshine Coast hinterland, Australia). Her work has been published in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom, including in Mslexia, Crannóg and The Weekend Australian.