The black tarred hearse arrives at the crematorium,
going no faster that three miles per hour,
it glides to a stop, measured, composed,
running out of steam, the engine making a last growling sound
of torture
as it silently falls asleep.
I watch from the shaded part of the graveyard
having taken time out to enjoy
the tranquillity that other people’s passing secures
and in the bright brilliant sunshine, I think of the grandfather
I never had the will to bury as the coffin containing James Collins
is heaved upon the shoulders of men strong and true,
the World Cup lifted with national joy
gaining no more honest respect at that moment
from the strangers marking time,
marking time
marking time,
one foot at a time and with no bells calling the crow like masses.
A woman dressed in a pleated black skirt stubs out the cigarette
she has been smoking and with a smile jokes to her friend,
just out of whispered caw ear-shot, “Oh good, he’s finally arrived”
and she wipes the residue of ash that stuck
to her fingers on her backside, leaving a grey smudge
on the day.
Her friend, anxious it seems, to lift the lid on the day
and make her way to the wake
where her singing would rouse the dead in jive celebration
left behind the funeral service order on the bench,
and like the graves I sat amongst as I waited for the next but one
funeral to appear, was both forgotten,
unkempt, a guarded veil in which we try to never cross between,
the study in black tradition, forsaken,
in the ash bottomed revellers and the Karaoke serenade
of his favourite song
in which he proclaimed to have done it his way…
as long as his widow allowed him to.
From up the hill, the sight of a young woman hurrying,
the pram with infant spoil
almost running away from her, totters down the lane,
her hair running in the grip
of the spectre at the feast
and I hoped somewhere deep down inside
and perhaps with a smile and tempting laugh,
that in his final moments, that this future resident in seventy years
was the child of the man going into have songs made well,
for wouldn’t that have been the best way
to bow out of this Earth.
Ian D. Hall 2015