Two gifts

The section of Mourid Barghouti’s poem Midnight (which she had marked in the copy by our bed) read at Deborah’s funeral yesterday:

The soul retains its passion
even on the cross,
the body has its dance,
even on the ropes.
The war enters into farce:
They bomb a butterfly!
It becomes
even more farcical:
the butterfly has not died
but, with its fragility still intact,
has grown yet lovelier,
towering above the hubris of the general
and his science of war.
Here is half the triumph:
the butterfly, armed with
nothing but its beauty and the thrust of its wings,
enters the contest, sure of death.
It will die, it knows it will die,
– from the qualities of the killer and from its own qualities.
Yet,
from the window of a future despair,
it will return,
flapping its wings in the rooms of fancy.
The soul retains its passion even on the cross,
even on the ropes, the body has its dance.

And the view of the sun on the snow on Pen-y- ghent today (taken by one of her sons from the edge of the site in which she had just been buried).