Respectfully Absurd

Rituals of remembrance,

so weary, so salty-sweet.

Beside an open grave,

someone says words 

about a dead man whose

corpse lies in a manufactured

box nearby. The memories

of him will never be riper

than they are now. No one

will think to recall him after

a few months, it not days, if

not . . . Even at the moment

how many listeners are 

thinking of other things, 

or wondering what the point

of funeral services is? "Funeral

services" has the ring 

of American assembly lines. 

That's all right. The frail,

exhausted nobility of mournful

practices preserves their worth.

They're respectfully absurd.

hans ostrom 2019

Memorial Cemetery

(Lakewood, Washington)

It's like farmland, groomed
by commercial lawnmowers,
not cattle. The crop consists

of brass or granite rectangles,
with names and numbers
on them, and sometimes

phrases, and sometimes
the phrase is in the second
person, a you who cannot

hear or read (so what?),
whose bones lie beneath.
There's no harvest, only

planting, deeper than
the grass. Memory must
adjust to the sound of

mowers. There are lots
of names of soldiers,
sailors, pilots, many

from what we call the
Viet Nam War Era, many
who died in their 40s.


hans ostrom 2019