FuneralRites

I wrote these words after going to a crematorium for the funeral of an Irish relative.
What a wonderful legacy of aspiration in a nation of 'scholars and saints' genetically and spiritually driven to greatness and self destruction.
There amongst the hosts...I reflected on influences in my own life, which become threads of the romantic Camelot of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the tragedy of a lost President.
Then the edges,somehow,blurred as I saw him disappear.
'He loved the horses and enjoyed a drink.' And as we watched the curtains fold, and Judy Garland piped this song, one of his fiends told me that before they screwed down the open coffin, he had put a bottle of whiskey in his dead hands.
The words are recited by a synthetic computer voice - it is counterpoint, maybe one day a machine will cry - and then for the first time since I was a boy, so will I.
Meanwhile I mourn: the death of poetry. Transcendence and the machine.