Memento Mori

Featured Poet - Liz Quirke

It’s a new year in Rathass and the gravediggers are at it again. At a crematorium up the country, there’s a backlog. My day-dark mind conjures bodies stacked idly in cold rooms, toe-tagged to await animation from one form to another. I see it all – the curtain’s swish, the swelling blaze. Our tribe has suffered many deaths, we are made small by each church-bell toll, every candle famed to life in perpetual memoriam. At the mandatory rites and rituals, rarely are the lost remembered in ways other than abstract, to mention cause of death invites a corpse to sit up and speak, their words too much, so speak low, speak quick or not at all, the man-dug hole is surely deep enough to hold us all, by now.