New poem out in Strange Horizons

…and when you wander the orchards,
your robe’s light, long sleeves swimming
with your motion, the trees bear fruit
and flower on the same branch—both delicious (of course

I’ve tasted the petals too; if anything I have only become
more curious, knowing now how much more there is
to learn). Or you can roll up those sleeves to do
some gentle garden work, meditative and

invigorating. We do not, of course, need a harvest to eat—hunger
is a memory, starvation a silly rumor—nor blossoms
to add more beauty. You know I never cared much
for flowers, but all beauty is meaningful here, and everything is

beautiful, and everything beautiful
can be trusted.

-excerpt, “From Summerland“

This piece started in my car, as I was driving somewhere on a pleasant spring day and reflecting on how my ideal “heavenly” weather is exactly that–late spring, with lots of sun but not too much warmth. Summer used to be lovely, I guess, before the climate change, but it’s also muggy. If not outright dangerous thanks to fires and heat advisory. And then I have friends who are wild for autumn and even winter, which I find rather depressing.

But! This is not a poem about weather. It’s actually about death. Or after-death. “Summerland” is the name often given to the afterlife in Spiritualism, the religion based in mediumship that sprang up in the 1800s and is still going today. I’m certainly not the first bereaved person to get extremely interested in Spiritualism — in my case I’m not planning to convert (not sure they even do formal ‘conversions’) but it’s often moving to read about. Its paradise is an engaging mixture of the mundane and the spiritual, blissful but flexible, much more so than the constant-singing-praises-to-God-above-the-glassy-sea of the Christianity I grew up with.

So on my drive, I considered who decided Summerland was summery and whether its inhabitants might have other opinions. At my destination, I pulled out the notepad I keep in my car and started writing, considering other details of what this life after life is like, and how it might be described — if it can be. A common complaint mediums delivered from their communicants was just how tricky it was to put these things in words that living people use (a difficulty enhanced by the fact that dead people, as attested to by mediums and by a number of near-death experiencers, don’t speak but rather make use of telepathy). And that also adds a sort of edge to this poem — the uncertainty of communication — because even as I indulge in thoughts of how nice Summerland might be, I can’t yet trust everything beautiful. I’m wary of wish fulfillment when it comes to something as important as death and eternity. I kept writing through that wariness, and the final stanzas came as a sort of answer. Maybe. What do you think?

If nothing else it gets back to one of the themes I’ve written about again and again, which is longing. The basis of eroticism and grief and quite a bit of religion.

Several of the ideas behind the depiction of Summerland in this poem come from a short book by professor and philosopher of religion Stafford Betty, The Afterlife Unveiled. The reference to cigars and sex is about a communication Sir Oliver Lodge believed he received from his son Raymond (who died in World War One), which I first encountered in Colin Wilson’s Afterlife: An Investigation.