Cold Death
The other day was cold and windy. The other day an old friend was buried. I do not know which is worse: to be buried in the cold of winter when everything else is dead, or in the heat of summer when the greenery of life makes stark contrast. Of course, that question is of interest only to the survivors; I firmly expect that the decedent is without preference.
Below, a poem about the burial of my friend:
BURYING A JEW IN WINTER
Pine box blond and square,
simple as possible, stark and improbable,
topped by a six-pointed wooden star,
rests on a platform before the lectern.
Behind, a large window many feet wide and high
frames dark brown trees clutching last leaves of autumn;
beyond which, funereal green hills end in cloud-specked blue,
hiding memorial plaques sunk flat to the earth.
We fifty or so souls have come to bury the man in the box,
after prayers, after tears from children,
after his grandchild murmurs words from her book she carries,
after she nestles into her mother’s protecting body.
What can be known of the man in the box,
by reason of those today attending his rites,
people in dark suits or in zipper jackets,
people gray and bent and young and uncomfortable,
those with tears and those with handshakes and wry smiles,
the older gentleman at the end of my row, gaunt and towering,
his tattoos showing where wrists escape his worn jacket
and taper to tendril fingers with tips painted red?
The man in the box, we are told: kind, respected, gentle, firm, successful,
fatherly and grandfatherly but both in the best manner,
addicted to fishing and family and friends and physical maladies.
A poem is recited assuring us he is fishing the shores of heaven.
Eyes grow heavy with tears and weight of moment
while out the window dank trees sprinkle last random leaves,
eviscerated by winds of time and chill, onto cold ground,
foreshadowing the fate of the man in the box.
At the grave, deep-dark, plank-rimmed and neatly squared,
unknown people who dug the hole had last touch as they lowered him into it.
A prayer in a foreign tongue, tosses of dirt from the convenient pile,
the dead man and the dead leaves and the dead dirt mix into the earth.
Some time, a year from now, a few will return,
chant prayers for the dead,
place on the sketchy grass a metal plaque with name of the man in the box
and cry tears for yesterdays.
Today we turn away, leaning into the hill to regain the road,
sadness writ in facial lines and lumbered gait,
fraught thoughts for the progeny and memory of the man in the box,
who serves unintended proxy for those who mourn.
May the memory of the man in the box be for a blessing
until all of today’s witnesses share the self-same ground
and, thus and thereafter none will remain to remember what rests
beneath a plaque with an unfamiliar name….
Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash ….….
About The Author
Stephen Honig
Stephen Honig has been writing fiction and poetry all his life. The sources of his writings are of course his life experiences: growing up in ethnic New York City; attendance at two alleged bastions of Ivy League erudition; a long career in the law with its attendant exposures to people, business and technology; reading everything eclectic along with alleged classics of the Western canon; wide travel including a gig in the USSR in the ‘70s to bring legal briefs to refuseniks; teaching at three colleges and at a law school in Russia; raising two families in very different generations. Now, Honig has completed his first novel, Event, a thriller combining the international espionage style of John Le Carre with the gripping pace of novels by James Patterson. If you’d like to sign up to automatically receive my blog posts, please go to the Contact page and submit the form. Thank you!