Laura Michelle Weaver
Poet and Teacher
November 3, 1968-February 17, 2024
After a nearly eight-year cancer battle, Laura left us with the following words in her poem Across the Threshold:
What if death were not a failure
but the bright blossom of our green age—
not annihilation but miracle.
What if death is not a cutting but a rooting—
not a cessation but an engagement to a Lover
who will lead you to the River of Forgetting
so you can take your next Breath of Remembering.
What if death is not a failure, but a miracle—
Not a nightmare, but a gallop on a silver horse
through the doorways of Twilight.
What if, in our dying, we become
the imaginal cells of a metamorphic universe
that is always turning into a butterfly.
What if we simply become rhizomes
in the Great Fields of Calla Lillies—
gramophones of the Universe playing
all the soul songs human beings ever sang
as we walked along the shorelines
of thousands of lifetimes.
What if we are simply going over the edge
of a rushing falls to the cool pools beneath,
where carp swim with our great great grandchildren—
who are just preparing to dive into a body.
Those who were with Laura as she crossed the threshold are grateful for the life, love,
passion, and wisdom she shared with us: Her parents, Bob Weaver and Pamela Trachta; her sister, Erin Weaver McDonald; her children, Simon Alexander (and his partner, Margherita Peri) and Mariah Alexander; and her six-month-old miracle granddaughter, Sofia Lily Alexander.
