Deadly Poem by David Lewis Paget

I said that we shouldn't place it there
When first we surveyed the town,
The only place for the dead, I said,
Is six feet underground,
They shouldn't be way up there on a hill
When it rains, their bones will leach,
And run down into the drinking water
Pumped on up from the beach.

But no, they wouldn't listen to me,
The Town and the Council Jerk,
He said, ‘we'll set it up in the trees
I think that that will work.'
So the town was built on the valley floor
And the dead stuck up on the hill,
I told them what I had said before
When the first became so ill.

The older ones were the first to go
They'd fade away in the gloom,
There wasn't enough flesh on their bones
To warrant a marble tomb.
But then the young had begun to fade
Were beginning to be so ill,
That soon the hearses making their way
Were all lined up on the hill.

The population began to grow
But not down there in the town,
The figures seemed to reflect and show
They were six foot underground,
And then the copse of surrounding trees
Began to glow in the night,
Give off a pale evanescent glow
Some said was blue, others white.

When lightning struck in that grove of trees
It forked and struck on the hill,
And burst some bodies, with their disease
From coffins, wriggling still.
I heard reports of a walking corpse
That tried to kick in a door,
And when they saw who the corpse had been
They found he'd lived there before.

I said that we shouldn't place it there
When first we surveyed the town,
The only place for the dead, I said,
Is six feet underground.
The town has paid for the Council Jerk
Who buries them up there still,
On days that the dead come walking down
From the cemetery, up on the hill.

20 October 2016