Mother, and years later, Father
in the dim and peaceful church
with stained-glass saints gazing.
They lay in oaken coffins,
heaped with lilies.
Where did that oak come from?
I wished it was from the woods around,
where perhaps when they were young,
they wandered through, and looked up
to treetops where leaves trembled
and shook and were content.
The coffins looked so small.
These were my parents, who in
my baby days were giant, and perfect,
and in my childhood days seemed
cruel so much of the time.
And who in their later days
tried to cling to me from far away,
aggrieved when I could not spend
with them the time that they wanted.

I realized the minister
was saying Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
I had missed so much of the service.
I watched the coffins go by, one
years ago, one not so long ago.
On both occasions
flowers heaped atop seemed to
tremble.

I could have said it served them right
that they were not buried in the quiet
churchyard of our village, under spreading
beech with generations of our family,
and with the people of our village that they had known.

Instead they were lowered into bare and
open ground, the new burial park where
no trees had been planted
and everything is open to the sky.