Poem – Cremation (By David Russell)

Cremation

 

I’ve always believed in cremation;

Flames bleach the world, unclutter living things.

 

Let scum survivors, grasshoppers

Leave cemeteries a mess

Of living impulses dismembered.

Not knowing fire’s totality

But sickly honouring it stunting

In tortured carbon stench.

 

I’ve always believed in cremation

Ever since I read of great skull mountains;

Those potash handfuls are so clean –

A powdered love of life.

 

I think of bones and masonry,

Of skeletons and architects.

Humanity’s erections;

Are we the greater polyps?

No – we are parasites.

 

No longer do we draw from deserts

Our pride’s stark affirmation

But – aimless – puncture, scar and crater

Real skin, flesh, sinew, bone.

 

Prime tombs remain, aimed starwards,

Steering earth;

For ones they were, for everyone.

Termite-wretches, harsh-bound inside one frame

With all for others.

 

So is this past? Are we now free –

With monuments so empty, blinded to stars,

Time-choked, chasing a mercury present –

That wriggling lump we would congeal

To parry our mortality –

Reassured joke, bluff, never using

By thinking of dismantling

When Fury, justly channeled,

Skims from eccentric earth?

 

The first was built to say

“We stand forever, cleaving heaven and earth.”

 

The last: “We can accept the moment only;

When all’s affirmed, we are as powder.”

 

I’ve always believed in cremation.

 

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