Gravedigger

You long for redemption after death.
But redemption after death is a probable myth.

You long for that myth.  But all you desire
is a fiction.  Here are the facts you need,

as far as can be told
from this side:

death is final.  You’ve been digging a hole
all your life, tunneling away from it.

That hole will fail you and in a panic
you’ll dig another one to find dirt to fill it,

having given away all you dug out of it
as a penance ahead of the expected redemption. 

You’ll keep digging, filling the previous hole,
making a new one, always falling short as you dig.

You’ll be surrounded by holes up to the moment
you die, and then you’ll fall into one of them.  That one

will come out even, because you will have put everything
you rightly own into it. 

Someone’s going to trip over the pits you’ve left behind.
You can’t even apologize to them.  Offense continues

to build even after you’re gone. 
You’ll never get even.  You’re a gravedigger

and all you bury is the original myth
with every stroke of the shovel.