O! Those Old Morose ' Traditions Still Tarried Upon Mourning The Dead... Poem by Frank James Ryan Jr...fjr

Fresh flowers...clipped at the stems,
sliced on an angle-
so they'll breathe at the parlor....
deeper, longer, yet in two day's
they'll lay dying, with the dead,
but far more restless...unstill...and-
piled upon soft, damp soil,
into a tower of floral waste
from the back of an El Camino.

Coffeee, and petit-fours,
Artuso's Little Italia Bakery
awaiting our arrival,


[From our black limousines,
with those deep pinched leather seams
that take on its own dark ambience]


to deliver us from death, back to life,
to the home of the widow,
the woman in mourning.
And we'll smack our salted lips,
at the site of the pastries,
and slap each others backs
at the sharing of the tell-tale,
and carry-on about the follies
of the deceased.

Redundant cliches play a pestilent tune, like:
''It's the only time we get together it seems'',
and, '''Doesen't he look just like himself'''?
And as a small child, I would always think:
Who else do they think he would look like?

Sat, and watched the last of the arrangements,
flooding the rear of the black El Camino;
Saw petals.....all shapes and colors,
strewn through the highway wind,

[like confetti dipped in Crayola water paint
or a spectacled Greenwich Village parade]-

streaking past my peripheral view,
as I peer through the tinted glass,
at the cars passing by us,
while counting how many faces
were staring back at mine,
as we procession to the yard,
for the last of good-byes,
Father Quinn leads in prayer,
liquid blessings strike the pine,
soon to be draped
by a languid toss of roses-
Amadeus,
passion-red,
short stemmed, and thornless.

And aft' the final rose finds rest on the wood,
and we all walk away, like zombies on morphine
I look back and marvel-
how all the flowers, now dead.....
are so irreverantly piled................,
muse as to why they always seem
to resemble an Egyptian pyramid.
Strange souls we be...when Death arrives;
No wonder why God made us mortal...!




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-Frank James Ryan Jr. / FjR-