Last Request

Take me to Calcutta,
to the house of the dying,
walls white as bones,
floor of dust. Mother Teresa will wait
as I leave, as she does for each –
waves, spending themselves,
unending on the beach,
the shell-white sand.

Let her take my hand.
The dying save no room
for the visit of the false
friend of jealousy – you should not
forget who we are.
Mother’s hand will steady
our vision as the quaking earth
reclaims our bones.

Perhaps, if I’m set in the sea,
my bones will be digested
and expelled onto the shore.
Perhaps lovers
will one day walk on
bone-white sand, steadying
each other, holding hands.
Perhaps my bones will be mixed
into concrete to build towers,
to reshape the broken skeleton of this city.

Built with sand, it will all fall.
Let it be. This city
will be reclaimed – you must separate
yourself from it, even if your bones
cannot leave. Join me
in Calcutta, in time. Bear me
to my final birth.
Leave this city in time – follow,
surging, melting through the sand
like the next wave.

*Steven Luke Hankins, born in 1984, grew up in Louisiana and currently lives among the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He is an associate editor of Asheville Poetry Review, and is a student in the Indiana University M.F.A. program, where he holds the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. His poetry has appeared in The Modern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Verse Libre Quarterly, and in an anthology entitled Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writing from Rising Generations, among other places. ("Last Request" originally appeared in The Rectangle.)