Facebook Afterlife
I wished Abernathy a belated happy birthday,
having noticed on my Facebook page
his birthday occurred two days before.
Only then did I remember
Abernathy’d died six months earlier –
he’d “become late,” as they say
in the Botswana lady detectives novels;
he’d “passed,” as my friend Lewis puts it.
I’d read somewhere
that not so long from now
more than half of the Facebook accounts
will be owned by dead people.
Unclear who notifies whom
to remove the page, the contact.
This has happened to me before –
a birthday wish to a young woman friend
who’d died from ovarian cancer in her thirties,
another to a poet friend who’d taken his life.
It makes me ponder about the Afterlife –
Heaven or Hades or Nirvana,
Paradise, Valhalla, the Gardens of Delight,
joining the ancestors in The Dreaming,
absorbed into Nature,
one with the trees, the ocean, the sky.
Or Facebook.
©2021 Charles Rammelkamp All rights reserved.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, has just been published by Clare Songbirds Publishing.
