Where do pelicans die?

By Sharon Lopez Mooney 

I’ve never seen a dead pelican on my dock where they fish, 

does a relative or others fly in formation bringing the
body out to sea into the maw of deep currents? 

How do their mates mourn? 

Do neighbor pelicans bring them a catch of the day 

so they don’t have to leave their grieving? 

How about the energetic wrens? Who tends the chubby little body 

when there’s a death, do friends gather in their favorite ficus tree 

sheltered, to keen for the lost youngster who couldn’t sit still? 

I, too, have lost friends over these last years, 

not lovers or family, just lovely friends 

and I felt the quick cut of aloneness wound me anew. 

I cannot go back in time to the first flush 

of that friendship, cannot travel back over miles to 

lay my hand on their door to say good-bye. 

They pass like those fallen pelicans, those friends, teachers, comrades, 

pass from me like the slowing of my gait, the limits of my eyes 

in an ache of loss that hardly shakes the world. 

Sharon Lopez Mooney, poet, is a retired Interfaith Chaplain, who worked in the death and dying field, now lives in Mexico on the Sea of Cortez, and visits family in northern California. Mooney received a 1978 CA Arts Council Grant for a rural poetry series and helped publish a regional arts journal and has produced poetry readings and performances. Mooney’s poems are or will be published in The MacGuffin, The Muddy River Poetry Review, The Avalon Literary Review, Adelaide International Magazine, Galway Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, California Quarterly, Hags on Fire, The Ricochet Review, Roundtable Literary Journal, Visible Magazine, NewVerse News, Evening Street Review, among others.