Funeral Poems for a Loved One

You are not far, though far you seem,

not lost, but folded into light;

you are the warmth behind a dream,

the quiet keeping of the night.

When morning lifts the highveld haze

and birdsong spills across the lawn,

I feel you in the ordinary days —

in every dusk, in every dawn.

So I will carry where I go

the love you gave, made strong and wide,

and all the small things that I know

you would have noticed at my side.

We do not lose the ones we love;

we learn to hold them differently —

in laughter that arrives unasked,

in songs that catch us suddenly.

Your kindness settled in our hands;

your patience taught us how to wait;

your courage walks with us still

through every ordinary gate.

Grief is only love with nowhere

left to go but back to us,

and so we keep you, every day,

without a word, without a fuss.

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

The chair beside the window waits;

the garden carries on its green;

the kettle still remembers you,

the small, warm rooms of in-between.

We do not need a grander world

to hold the place you used to fill —

the tea, the talk, the open door,

the ordinary love, loved still.

If I should go before the rest of you,

break not a flower nor inscribe a stone;

nor when I am gone speak in a Sunday voice,

but be the usual selves that I have known.

Weep if you must, the way the rain must fall,

but let your grief be gentle, and be brief.

Laugh as we laughed; remember as you go

how good it was to love, for all the grief.