Gordon Smedt © 2019
by Joe Vaughan
Death Rattle
There’s a famous gif of a skeleton
playing the trumpet. Were they in life
a lover of music? Or did they take to
it so late in the day, dead
keen, like an amateur
planting lilies in
in winter, my cat exploring
the emptied cupboards of the
flat we leave this afternoon? What
would their friends think
of this bag of bones so full
of song and learning? The nurses, the
doctor, the certificates, the
straight-faced lads with
short-back-and-sides
nursing the coffin? Balloons
at a funeral. Here is
song and it is weightless and it fills
up like paper. I wonder
if we should be sad.