Ode to Undertakers
We admire you. After just having told each other another joke about necrophiliacs, you can put the grin into your pocket and pull out that look of compassion. Most people are too sick with grief to notice any insincerity. You wouldn’t be seen dead (forgive the pun) breaking into a genuine smile. You bow and scrape, showing respect. Well, you’re doing it several times every day, it’s become a professional habit.
You can handle it all, the sorrow, the widow wondering about her future loneliness, the child’s distress, the father breaking under the weight of the loss of his six-year-old. You always give our money’s worth. And you never lose your cool. That comes with the job.
When we buried my father, you provided six burly pallbearers in black suits, black hats, white gloves, who wobbled in a stately way like giant, fat, black beetles, my father’s coffin on their shoulders. After slowly letting it down into the black hole, we could hear a soft thud. After pulling up the ropes, they took off their white gloves and dropped them on to the coffin. This time there were six soft thuds— like butterfly kisses. We waited for the hats to follow. But instead they took them off in deference to the occasion. Where would we be without you?
The Storm and the Circus
They hadn’t thought of the parsonage. Every cottage had been searched, every house and apartment on the High Street had been suspect. Now and then there was something to be said about small places and the village greens, the gentle click of bat on ball, the ladies making tea.
It had once been a quiet spot of hushed voices and whist parties. The vicar himself would occasionally gain a few tricks, his wife knew her place. When the storms came they closed the shutters and listened to the lashing rain, watched bows break off the chestnut trees on the green ripping open the circus tent and overturned three cages.
The tiger was found asleep in the baker’s coal shed, the puma in the butcher’s pantry, the snake had found her way to the parsonage.
The Guilty Secrets I Never Told My Children
Shiny eyes in the doorway, hands holding up transparent plastic bags, the slanting sun reflecting the water and something orange. The fun fair was only two blocks away, I could hear the music of the roundabouts, and the ‘dings’. “If you care for them, feed them, clean the aquarium…”
Well, we had a small pond dug in the back garden where they grew fat and important, the frogs settled, the tadpoles hopped from the creeping jenny when challenged by curious fingers. There were water lilies.
London’s winters were usually mild, the Gulf Stream and England having an understanding. One year that contract must have been broken: the thermometer fell to an unexpected minus 5° C. The gardener hauled out a frozen block of water looking spectacular with several orange smudges.
That was the winter in which our two hamsters died on the same day. I buried them immediately— didn’t want the kids to see their little bodies— the frozen earth an almost impossible obstacle. A few months later I read that hamsters hibernate.
A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and eight poetry collections, her work has been widely published (and widely rejected) in mostly US poetry journals. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/