Sleep well my love, it’s okay to go.
For as you unlace your fingers,
 and drift from me, I know you are
emerging, elsewhere, as effortlessly
as you slipped into your body at birth.
As the swimmer dives through the
image of themselves on water,
you are passing through to surface
again, alive and eager, into light.

I choose to think of you as fledging.
You’ve been beckoned to follow
a call I cannot yet hear. The same
way swift and swallow fall into air,
fixed on nothing but the urge for
something beyond; a certainty
that between the sun and the moon,
the stars, the horizon, the glittering
sea, lies the way home.

Nothing is wasted in life, or lost
in death. We plant memories in
those we love. Our bodies return
gently to this earth. Atom, Molecule.
Ecosystems of rebirth make us again 
as seed, flower, rock, feather, rain.
So, know this, then: You will forever
remain here with me, even as you fly
now into the open skies of eternity.