No Wonder Why God Made Us All Mortal Beings...!
Fresh flowers, sliced at the stems, on an angle...,
so they breathe at the parlour....deeper, longer;
still, in two day's they'll lay with the dead...dying,
tossed like trash from a black El Camino.
Coffeee, and petit-fours,
from Artuso's Bakery
awaiting our arrival,
from black limousines,
to deliver us from death, back to life,
to the home of the widow in mourning;
and we'll smack our salty lips,
at the site of the pasteries,
and slap each others backs
at the sharing of tell-tale,
carry-on 'bout the deceased.
Redundant cliches play a pestilent tune, like:
''It's the only time we get together it seems'',
and, '''Doesen't he look just like himself'''?
And as a child, i would think: Who else would he look like?
Sat, and watched the last of the arrangements,
flooding the rear of the black El Camino;
Saw petals.....all shapes and colours,
strewn through the highway wind,
streaking past my peripheral view;
makes me glance out the tinted glass,
at the cars in the faster lanes,
counting how many faces
were staring back at mine,
as we procession to the yard,
for last good-byes,
Father Quinn leads in prayer;
morose toss of roses,
Amadeus,
passion-red, short stemmed, and thornless.
And after the final rose finds rest on the wood,
and we all walk away, like zombies on qualudes,
i look back o'er my shoulder, and marvel,
how all the flowers,
now dead..... are irreverantly piled,
and i muse as to why they always seem
to resemble an Egyptian pyramid.
Strange souls we be...When Death arrives;
No wonder why God made us mortal...!
poem by Frank James Ryan Jr.
Added by Poetry Lover
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