Prospects

Prospects

There isn't much that can be said
now he's finished, over, dead.

Perhaps a flimsy paragraph
is fitting as an epitaph,

a word or two beside the grave,
mutterings of being brave

to children as they clutch a flower.
It's complete in half an hour.

We walk away for cakes and tea,
remembrances, sympathy,

anecdotes about the way
he was before the thudding clay

reclaimed the hair, the bone, the skin
he kept his understanding in.

Now every time we think about
the silenced laughter leaking out

to fertilise the wormy soil
he's laid in, so our senses coil

with knowing where he's gone so we
will go, finished, over, free.