Trumpets

There you are lying flat in that expensive box with bronze handles and white padding, while just across the hill lie your mother and father sinking into sod forgotten under their flat piece of bronze with it’s hide-away flower pot. You who hated being in the Army that year of 1944, have flags and fuss and marching bands over your head as irritants to your long wait. Mother won’t be coming. She faded into a box that sat forever in her favorite chair ashes in plastic in cardboard one day gone perhaps thrown overboard, by her third husband, at sea or in the bay perhaps thrown into the trash in a moment of drunken Anger or flat out meanness toward those who live. Soon I’ll have a little box in death just as my step-father did. He too has trumpets and a rifle or two booming out over the greensward above Nearby his mother lies calling him eternally to task for his undone and cruel life.