A coffee with Karonti On the departure side Poem I Poetic diptych: 1

What if, before crossing the final river, there were time for one last coffee?A Coffee with Karonti is a poetic journey into the territory between departure and arrival, memory and oblivion, silence and death. At its center stands Karonti-the ancient ferryman not merely as a guardian of the underworld, but as a mysterious companion who listens to the questions we carry when everything else has fallen silent.These poems inhabit the fragile hours of farewell: the moments when a life is measured not by what remains, but by what can no longer be taken with us. Love, solitude, memory, regret, time, and the shadow of mortality become passengers on the same boat.The coffee is bitter, intimate, almost ordinary.The conversation is not.On the Departure Side is not a book about death alone. It is a meditation on what it means to live while knowing that every road eventually becomes a road of departure.And somewhere beyond the last shore, Karonti is waiting.Perhaps he has already poured the coffee.