Death is no stranger to me.
I've flirted with it before.
In childhood,
a friend slipped on a stone,
fell into the stream —
and it took him.
It was an accident.
A cousin,
sick in mind,
ended his own pain.
It was the world's wound.
My grandparents,
past eighty,
ninety,
almost a hundred…
It was human nature.
Then came the pandemic,
and it took many loved ones.
They were casualties of a war.
But when my father
was snatched from the work he loved,
in a second's pause
to eat a sweet,
I felt betrayed.
It was a stab in the back.
Poem by Silvio de Souza Lôbo Junior, Or Sílvio Lôbo, poetry about death, grief, and the loss of a father. Goiânia, 2025.
