“generate a poem about drowning and watching your life flash before your eyes.”

Beneath the grasp of green and swirling tide,  
Where sunlight folds its arms and slips away,  
I tumble, clasped in water’s urgent glide,  
And memory parts the waves of present day.

Above, the world grows hazy, bends and warps—  
A distant bell, a childhood summer’s call,  
My mother’s voice, the golden fields of crops,  
A bicycle, a secret, and a fall.

The laughter spills in bubbles from my lips,  
With every gasp, a reel of faces spins—  
Old friends in classrooms, rain on camping trips,  
First trembling loves, long journeys, sudden wins.

I see my father, stoic by the door,  
Stars tangled in the thicket, soft and deep,  
A thousand afternoons upon the shore,  
The stories in the silence as we sleep.

Images flicker, vivid, sharp, then slow—  
A single boat that rocked in early light,  
The way the river sang so blue, so low,  
My hand outstretched in hope—then grip, then night.

There, in the hush between each beat and breath,  
I hold these fragments as the tide draws near,  
The sum of living, trembling before death,  
A tapestry, unraveling and clear.

Yet in the stillness, something breaks and mends—  
A warmth within the cold, a gentle rise—  
As if each memory, before it ends,  
Becomes a lantern lighting up the skies.

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