The Graveside Service

The priest said everything exactly as prescribed,
the earth to earth and ashes to the ashes bit,
the twenty-third was read and transcribed
into the cold morning air without the grit
of anything personal or specific to him.
The flowers were the winter kind in white,
the box was lowered on its solemn brim
and then we threw the dirt into the site.

At the graveside service standing in the cold,
all of us are doing what we’re told
by custom and by ritual and by the need to mark
the exit with a formality, a bark
at the silence, at the graveside service in the cold.

My cousin who had known him best of all of us
stood at the back and didn’t say a word,
the ceremony wasn’t for the two of them, no fuss
of service would have honored what occurred
between them over forty years of weekly dinners,
forty years of arguing about the same few things,
the ritual was for the rest of us, the beginners
at the actual grief, the ones whose stings
of loss were shallower and needed ceremony.

The hole in the ground is very practical,
it takes the casket and the casket takes the weight
of everything we came to say, the radical
simplicity of earth receiving what we create
and then return, the carbon and the rest
going back through soil the way the science says.
I watched the dirt fall and thought: this is the best
acknowledgment, the plainest of the ways
to say what happened and what happens next.