Verse – “We All Used to be Equal Under the Shroud”

About half way through my life
(I am now 3-score and 10)
funerals became the new
thing, “Celebrations of Life,”
with friends (no enemies would come)
saying fine or funny things
about the very special one
who sadly couldn’t be there then
because the ashes were still stored
at the crematorium
and might not ever be picked up,
or buried (unless family had
a plot already bought and paid for,
then a private internment
might for seven very short
minutes remind a few folks
that someone was dead.)

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 8, 2013