Elysium's Chimney Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Subtly now but every day
Grandmothers are passing away
Thoughtlessly they are floating upward.
The sky is greeting them
Playing the orchestras of their youth,
As their grandchildren mourn for them,
Thinking them the once kind vessels
That held them in Sunday School-
But they are not here
In our neighborhood graveyards,
Our non-canonical saints,
The beautiful gray-haired women
Who like lovely verbs
Worked hard to keep households
The places of well-kept safety.
Here they go now,
Passing through the clouds
Blurry eyed and delighted,
Clutching their favorite handbags
To their breasts as they shoot upwards
Through Elysium’s chimney,
Exclaiming “Brother Ned! ”
And “I declare! ”
But neither cursing nor blaspheming,
Keeping their souls as they
Kept their houses clean for company.
Now all the saints do them honor,
Conducting them like
Pardoned convicts
Exonerated from gravity’s decay,
Loosed from the sun’s patriarchy.
So soon the conductor is calling,
“Last stop, Pluto. Last stop now! ”
But not a single grandmother gets off.
They stare curiously at the
Dark old bachelors walking that place
And hold their breath until
The train is moving on,
Past the planets now,
Past all that is imperfectly known
Into the beating hearts of their mothers
Like old philosophers
Rejoining what they have always
Known to be....