On Death I Have No Opinion Poem by Jim Young

Boys knocking nature about,
Kicking the clods, squashing the beetles,
Slingshots drawing the birds to earth and
Shotguns the rabbits down.
The death of beasties is not all beastly.
To kids they simply died.
But the death of people
Was a halting nuance, that
Once drawn, was forever out of Eden.

But the first mortalities were not people
But signal boxes, engine sheds, capsized ships,
Favourite trees and treehouse dens.
They touched the heart much more than
The quick and the dead.
The first indication that internal feelings had
Thought-strings tied to
Anchor points, that when displaced
Cast adrift regrets,
Alone in a cold, cold sea.
Pity to the rescue is sailing way behind.

A metal line post fell on a boy's head.
He was never 'right in the head' afterwards.
The man with the withered hand.
The man in grey overalls with a club foot.
The man with a permanent wry neck.
All in the arm lock of a vindictive mind
That twisted people and childhood's innocence.
Time to play truant from life.
The faster you run,
The more precarious your trajectory,
The more acute your ricochet from boulder to boulder,
The better to blow away such mortal memes.

Then Grandpa died,
And I touched his cold forehead
And wondered at his relaxed features.
Stood by his grave as the sexton tolled his bell.
Death was inside me now and would never vacate.
You lived with death, and the gap between one's co-existence
With the Valley and the Valley's percolating effect on your life slowed.
Grandpa said on his death bed
'I would rather be out of it than live like this'.
He died the next day.
Later
Gran died.
And grown men cried.

But on death I have no opinion.