For Want of a Ritual
(Upon the Death of My Father)

Life should stop
if but for a brief pause.
Some attention
must be paid
to this passing.

Were we in the south,
old men would pull over
get out, and doff caps or hats
at a stranger’s funeral procession,
bowing sunburnt necks
in prayerful dignity
and recognition
of our common destiny. 

Yet I, your own daughter,
grateful for your life given,
plow on through work, 
all but oblivious
like a clod in the foreground
of Bruegel’s Icarus
that you fell 
into death virtually unnoticed. 

There’s something 
terribly wrong-- 
there’s no gathering
that stops time
with steps into eternity,
no words, no music,
no obsequious flowers,
no procession of food,

no laughing-good stories,
not even a body to view.
All has been done
with a call to come
remove the body
for gift donation
to the university
you sent me to years ago.

Now I send you,   
unable to do more
like I wished you had
by sending me to private school
all those years ago. 
There’s no karmic satisfaction here,
only regret;
you deserve better

than to be scooped up
by state workers
in the same salary level
as those who remove dead dogs 
from the side of the road
by tossing beloved family pets
lost, forgotten, unclaimed,
into the back of a truck.

Your loss feels like 
my life’s roadkill.
In my rush to get ahead,
to make you proud,
I left you running blind
in the night to die
alone by the highway
to be expediently disposed. 

Something’s terribly wrong!
Kyrie’s must be cried,
confessions said,
absolution pronounced,
assurance offered . . . and received.
Ritual help is needed
to navigate conflicting demands
of love and duty.

But instead,
Nothing stops.
Children go on to school,
dogs still bark for food,
deadlines require meetings.
Lessons need learned
and mortgages paid.
Life goes on. 

I find, with the Victorians,
who knew how to do death up right,
even in all their maudlin mourning,
that I crave death knells,
a public notice
of death’s cruel passing
by the door of a house
wreathed in black crepe. 

Is there a black armband, at least?
Where’s the jazz band 
to walk a grave procession
then dance back in singing praise?
Where’s the feast of honor
for all the saints
who’ve stepped lively on?

Nowhere.  Here’s my only ritual:
an elegiac lament
writ large in pity--
a poem for a dead poet
who, stripped of words,
went silent for further study
by detached, scientific observers,
poetic reckoners of their own.    

So ring out the injustice
of our lack of witness
to a life precious and fiery
soaring so close to the sun.  
Some attention must be paid
to this passing,
if but for a brief pause.
Life should stop.

Then, and only then,
can we don our hats,
get back on the road,
and, with more studied awareness, 
proceed.       
 
 
 © 2007, Tess Lockhart.  All rights reserved.