To These Things Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Up cadaver: this is your apple, if you
Still have a tooth for the orchard:
This is your song:
Up, up, while the music still throws:
The kites are bending low
To dance with snakes in the yards of
I don’t know:
Up, cadaver, bend your spikenard into
A bow
And from your appendages throw:
Throw the songs that
I can never know- through the rivers
Cried from the sky:
Kiss and bless the things that have to
Die:
Dance, all over the churchyard,
With its warbling bell:
Dance all over the schoolyard,
With its kisses and tells:
And then sing to the airplanes in the sky,
Sing that they will never come down
To die:
Sing of the apples blossomed from the bough
Sing to these things so that they never have to know.