Death Bids Me Welcome

Death bids me welcome Into his tended garden Where quiet plots of bramble clots House names now long forgotten. Engravings faded, darkened serifs Tower over brighter plaques Sooted over gentleman Look down on neater blacks. Beneath Death’s open garden There nods no congregation A concert hall of empty audience Unseen by stage commotion. Their sandstone cradle cots Swaddled in lichen sheets Are emptied of their lifted souls Like beds of feeding babies. Not like the GI’s grinning whites Crosses stood – Attention! Polished to be each a sun To mark those souls’ ascension. This garden is like a tommy’s smirk With gaps for whistling breezes Bent double in his crooked laughter His cackling gravestone wheezes. Polite inclined as a footman’s bow And flowers curled to curtsies Roses, poppies, lilies attend Their arch and shield stone masters. Each of this staggered gathering Breathed out their rattling breath And out-shuffling their mortal shell Were welcomed home by Death. But he is not here seen Out on his lively lawn With reems of breathers, walkers, talkers Strolling where he welcomes all. In that lacquer case of copper rails He welcomes none alive Living mourners, pensive writers Wait outside while they survive. I hear his knell, a calling bell To bring out life en masse A host of mourners, singing lovely Wave off him who passed. Talking of their lost loved one They process with dabbing eyes The flowing tears of water’s life Make tributaries of sighs. So Death’s dour visage does faulty seem When welcomed in his garden A host of teeming, greening life Is bursting at the seams.