Poetry: Original, Exciting, Modern
At the back of my mind I had Auden’s poem ‘Miss Gee’ in writing this - less for the content than the tone, though his poem is funnier!
Funeral
by Robert Rowland Smith
The world, the weight, the blanket of lead,
The burial, the earth, the dead granite head.
An ammonite crushed between giant slabs,
Above is not sky but under the bed.
A stonemason chipped the omega out,
The black marble flew like crows round about;
The gravediggers shovelled the soil in damp clumps:
A hole for a damp mass of body dug out.
The worms in those clumps had been rudely displaced,
They begged, now unearthed, to be swiftly replaced;
Writhing and naked as if newly born,
They longed for blind darkness, more earth to taste.
The priest in his dun garb was kenning the Book,
Wondering if truly when Christ was forsook,
The Lord had effected His son’s rising up
In his shroud from the grave-cave…Was he mistook?
Well, reckoned the priest, be that as it may,
No doubts of that kind must get in the way
Of the offices I shall conduct for those grieving:
Nothing should upset their unhappy day.
The mourners processed in their veils and their suits
To where the old yew tree had spread out its roots
Like fingers to prod at the coffins interred,
Reach in and stroke faces or untie some boots.
By the yew, in the rain, was also the holly
Where now there came trundling an overfull trolley -
The pall bearers wobbling with the heft of the casket.
The widow, to block out the sight, tipped her brolly.
By the hole in the ground the company stayed
Like house builders watching the foundations laid -
A base upon which to set all the rest - and yet
Today marked no start but a being unmade.
Was this buried treasure or perhaps the reverse
They’d driven so gravely along in the hearse?
Thought the priest; and was the dead body
Now heading to heaven or somewhere far worse?
Maybe it’s neither, thought the priest as he said
“Ashes to ashes”. In its earthly bed
The corpse becomes fossil, its structure pressed flat,
And thus it lives on, though deader than dead.
Copyright 2025 Robert Rowland Smith Ltd