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.

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