[Matt Q]

Last orders

The nothing that you were before returns
when you are dead. I'll have no use for urns
or graveyard shrines, for ashes stored or strewn.
I won’t be there to read the chiselled runes
that green against a slab of canting stone.
Nor shall I rest in peace, nor sleep, alone
or with my lover's bones. I will not be.
No me. No loneliness. No company.

And yet, when tasked to specify my will,
to fill the aeons that aren’t mine to fill,
an image forms: my father, laid in deep
beneath a green field site, the wandering sheep
grazing above, the country dark, the rain.
Some wraith of wordless ache I can’t explain
would plant me there to keep him company.
Not that he is, of course. Nor would I be.

And then my sister, whom I hardly knew,
her simple churchyard grave. My brother, too,
his ashes, atoms now, lodge there, interred,
within her cot-sized plot. And it’s absurd,
but I would be with them. No loneliness.
No comfort, peace or sleep. No gods to bless
an afterlife that won't come next. No me.
Yet I would rest there in their company.

Cremate my body, then, I write at last.
I sense the void: it’s dark and cold and vast.
Burn away my flesh, grind down the bone.
I would not spend eternity alone.
I know I’ll never know the great abyss,
but share me out among the ones I miss.
For there or not, I’d rest more peacefully
if I had those I love for company.

.

S1L4 "greying"->"canting"
S1L5 was hexameter: "Nor shall I rest, not sleep for centuries, alone"
S3L1 "who"->whom