The Correct Response to Death

‘My father/best friend/cat

has just died, and I feel the need

to shoot a Michael Bay-type

action adventure movie

with more explosions than dialogue,’

said no one, ever

(not even Michael Bay).

I’ve never seen anyone turn up to a funeral

ready to deliver the eulogy

accompanied with a chainsaw-made ice-sculpture

of the deceased’s head.

Maybe you have,

in which case: congratulations!

Your circle of friends is clearly more eccentric

than mine.

When your beloved dies,

what will your grief move to you create?

An ambient score

for an art-house film?

An interactive art installation

made from salvaged computer screens

and recycled editions of Hansard?

Not something as morbid,

yet as strangely pedestrian,

as a paper-mâché death-mask, surely?

No, I think that you will do none of these things

and you will, instead,

be drawn to articulate your loss through poetry.

Even if you’ve never attempted

to engage Mistress Verse in conversation

since your disastrous first/last

failed attempts at school.

Even if your embarrassing

adolescent break-up poems

are so distant

that your memory can’t yield even a single title

from that woeful time

(appropriately marked with woeful poetry).

Even if you’ve

‘never really got poetry’,

poetry is what you will turn towards

when you find yourself needing to express

the inexpressible.

For poetry is the correct response to death.

The unacknowledged companion to grief:

denial, and poetry; anger, and poetry;
bargaining, and poetry;

depression, and poetry; acceptance, and poetry.

Chainsaws and blocks of ice

don’t really cut it, do they?