THE ROPE SWING
i.m. Liz Stafford
In the crematorium I try to sit,
if I can, where I can see the lawn
sloping up towards the landscaped copse,
and, today, blue sky. I assume the dead,
even if you could, would not begrudge
this longing to be elsewhere, to be free.
You have prepared for your death: choosing
the readings, and the hymns any pragmatic
atheist might know, briefing the eulogist
with selected work and leisure anecdotes.
I admire such fortitude, such command.
‘…send not to know for whom the bell tolls…’
At the funeral of a neighbour’s son,
among the family anecdotes
was one about a rope swing his dad had made.
The young man when still a very small boy
would swing ever higher from the garden oak
over the wall, the towpath and the canal.
I think of that now – pretty sure, like me,
that whatever risks you took were in your head
but were no less vertiginous for that.
Tricia
October 27, 2018Thank you for this poem remembering a rather interesting and special woman.
Geoff Wall
October 28, 2018Elegy is so difficult, when we moderns do it without the comforts of magical thinking. But this poem gets the full sad discomfort.