Challenging Poetry

it tolls for thee

the bells toll across the world,
silently, through numbers that tick upward
day by day. I watch them grow, rising,
ballooning, exploding into stratospheric
heights in our empty landscapes,
and wonder.

         is it so different for us than Donne?
in his day, bodies lined up
like cords of wood, stacked deep and flea-
ridden, and he felt the loss in his ears and heart
like a sparrow pecking a grain of sand
from a mountaintop, "a clod . . . washed
away by the sea."

         how much harder to remember, when
death is a number rising on the screen,
that “any man's death diminishes me.”
I am less, so much less. I feel the emptiness
of their loss, like drops of blood exuding from
my fingertips until I ache and tire, pints too low
to function.

         I close my eyes and hold on to them,
the numbers I do not know—the Papas and Nanas
Grampys and Grammys, Boos and Princes,
Pumpkins and Meemaws—so many names.
so many stories. so many endings
that should not have come so quickly, and I wish
that the bells would toll in my ears.
it's wrong to let them pass
in silent numbers on my screen.

line count: 29
April 29: poem embedding a quoted phrase (& cite it)
From a sermon by John Donne that includes this passage: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/no-man-is-an-island/