Funeral Door

by Dee Wade

The wreath announces to passers by
a funeral underway on the other side of that door,
and no matter how up tempo the liturgy,
how prettified the chancel or soothing the music,
it remains a dreary business, this death.

And the people inside writhe inside
because the man mourned, young at eighty two,
smart, tough, tender, faithful to the poor,
should not have spent four final months in agony,
mute, and locked away from family.

(Can’t overreaching Reaper,
from God, borrow a heart?)

We are all tired of it, this death.
Like smoke, its angry smell sticks to our clothes
that no earnest eulogy may fumigate;
the filamentous feel of it repulses every nerve
before numbing the feeler’s sense.

(Yes, it whips us every time,
but do we have to buy it flowers?)

When the preacher of the day
fits to her long-bow the only arrow in her quiver
that can penetrate so solid a subject,
she lets fly sharp proclamation not about the dead
but about the Lord of the living.

“The One who knows how it feels
to be crushed with pain and was poured out in death
yet lives again to see light and to birth love
releases resurrection by rolling away the funeral door:
through this opening lies Easter.”

Front door of First Scots Presbyterian Church,
Charleston, South Carolina