Daily Poetry Readings #132: The Afterlife by Billy Collins read by Dr Iain McGilchrist

Part 132 of a daily series of readings of his favourite poetry by Dr Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary. Today's poem is The Afterlife by Billy Collins.

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~ The Afterlife by Billy Collins ~

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals–eagles and leopards–and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

[annawray]

Thank you so much Iain, wonderful, what a glorious edit of poems that I now listen to every day

[paultartanella]

He didn't read the entire poem; what's up with that? The last stanza is the best - check it out.

[mrnobodyz]

I guess I am very much like a lot of other people, in that I hope to be reunited with departed loved ones and those who have loved me.

[turtlebayster]

Have it your way, the post modernist says, but this won't quite do, nor does he believe it.