Page 3 - Janet Watts - Funeral Order of Service FINAL

READING
Olivia Scarlett-Watts

“Leave-taking”
By Janet Watts

Your garden looked glorious that morning, almost voluptuous,
with those red-gold flowers whose name I can’t remember.
You lay against pillows, pale smile enfolding
the jumble of bones sticking through your pyjamas.
It was like taking a skeleton in my arms
when I took my leave of you
for what I didn’t know was the last time.

Your death came quick and sharp as life
blowing that fineness into a dust
falling on those left, bereft of all
but bright fragments – some joke, gesture, tone of voice;
or a minute together remembered, to save
and not ask the hour, or mourn the unlived years.

Death takes and leaves;
bequeaths its will of change to the living as the dead.
You have vanished and I am banished from where you were.
Yet what is gone, though not the same, goes on.
Sea thunders stone into sand, soft for walking by water.
Leaves leaving tress making mulch at their feet where they fall
and forests rise. At stations, departures cross arrivals
and happy returns; a birthday succeeds deathday
for people who divine the other side
of the scythe.