Communion of the Saints

July 5, 2023

Why is it love
emerges clearest
—though untouchable—
from whispers
of the dead?

I wrote the poem above as a strong, visceral reaction to scenes from Muriel Barberry’s novel, A Strange Country.

The dead must tend to the living
The living shall know strange friendships1

The poem is hardly changed from the first words I put down in late 2022, pen on paper, awash with the reading’s emotion while sitting across from friends in a rather noisy hipster Northern Virginia coffeeshop called Weird Brothers. When Barberry’s characters arrive at Hanase, the city of the dead in the world of elves, they enter an exclusive company equipped to survive an apocalypse impending against humans and elves, living and dead by drinking a thousand-year-old tea. The scene pulsates with a sort of transcendent energy. Unlike G.K. Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead,” or “the outnumbering dead” from Geoffrey Hill’s “Merlin,” Barberry’s Strange Country is a place where life and love bind across the dissolution of matter. Unsurprisingly, the result is music:

Ever since [they] had landed on the shores of Hanase, they’d been hearing the distant sounds of the dead all around them, mingled with the effervescence of the living. The first sip of the thousand-year-old tea, making its way to as yet untouched layers of empathy, had transformed the dull echo into a faint clamor, which the second sip evolved into a symphonic uproar.2

At first, I struggled to comprehend my own poem (without a title yet) and simply set it aside as a surrealist expression of grief, or joy, or something of their unspeakable sort. This poem resonated, visiting me from A Strange Country, but I did not understand it. It was something merely imagined rather than an embodied truth. From late 2022 into early 2023, I unknowingly made progress towards understanding while reading Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love with a friend. Kierkegaard argues that since love is most perfect when unconditional, expecting nothing in return, the purest expression of love is holding onto those who have passed on with a radical sort of memory. While my friend and I poked fun at the overly abstract chapter, within Kierkegaard’s existentialist argument lies a seed of patient truth:

Remember one dead and learn in just this way to love the living disinterestedly, freely, faithfully... Remember one who is dead, and in addition to the blessing which is inseparable from this work of love, you will also have the best guidance to understanding life; that it is one's duty to love the men we do not see, but also those we do see.3

Months after reading Barberry and Kierkegaard, I attended a funeral for my best friend’s grandmother and thought of this old poem while crying in the cemetery. All of a sudden, on July 5, 2023, I reached Hanase. Understanding broke on me at last as my grief brought me into the communion of the saints. In this deep mystery, strange music weaves together the living and the dead in a loving embrace more bodied than spirits and more spirited than empty material.

One note on the craft of the poem itself: I originally placed the em dash in line three at the end of the previous line, but moved it to further offset the “untouchable” and help it stand out as the wheel within the wheel, the spoke around which the rest of the poem turns. Love and death do move together, but they need a spoke. In order to reach Hanase, the poem must wrestle with loss even in embrace.

This poem appeared in early 2025 as a digital feature in Ekstasis Magazine, now Inkwell, which has since taken down their old website and migrated to Substack. I hope that the full archive will be available eventually, and I’m pleased to share this poem here!