It’s so important to record these things.  For whom?  God knows.  As art, as etude, as a meditation?  As a way to think through and clarify for one’s own benefit daily eventualities.  God knows – all of those.

          I Went To A Funeral Today

Simplistic in its way to say, but
I went to a funeral today.
Our ‘tractor man’ laid in the ground;
I wrote about him year two thousand.

Taking care of all he owned,
Scraping stony muddy snow;
Driving round his tracts of land;
Doing turns that only tractors can
And which, our tractor man was bound to.

Not to milk a tale said once,
Finance, romance, weakness, strength
But tale of more significance
Than in those years when I gave him, his circumstance
No jot,
Well, not a lot of thought,
To make up for it, for I now too am démodé,
And it’s important that I say:

Surreal-ly dreamlike is this life
With time’s phenomenon in strife
With peace we aim for,
Always on the move, at war, divisive;
With no inside proof, it’s tough.  Life’s rough.

Death, funerals banal,
My skull a barrel of confusion,
Is it all a grand illusion?
Peer groups going,
I here, with no chance of knowing
What’s in store, no more
Except to hope that time and fate will favor
Generations, generating
As all beauty queens declare,
“World peace with no death anywhere.”

All this from the lain to rest
Of neighbor passed occasionally -
Known to me but casually.
Respectfully I went to honor
Just to find myself a more intent participator.

I Went To A Funeral Today 11.30.2016
Birth, Death & In Between II; Pure Nakedness;
Arlene Corwin