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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.
Copyright ©
Alice Reynolds
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