Poetry
Emile Benoit

Photo Credit: drburtoni/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

What doesn’t kill us doesn’t always make us stronger. We can die weakly too. We can suffer the kind of death that slowly leaks and hemorrhages or eats its way through the marrow with tiny mouths and teeth. The kind that shatters the soul while leaving the body unbroken. If a mother is told that her child has died, don’t believe that she’ll be strengthened. She will be hollowed out like a gourd instead, a few dry seeds rattling from within if shaken. She will be extinguished except for those smoldering embers that were not thoroughly saturated with her tears. What doesn’t kill us can still make us pray for death.

Emile Benoit is a writer and teacher who lives in southern California with his wife and two daughters, Brady and Miranda. He’s written three books of philosophy in the literary style: Essays and Aphorisms on the Higher Man, The Artistic Perspective, and Beasts in Eden.