Julie Watkins
Wake I dislike funerals, but the Celt in me loves a decent wake. Not the polite, curly white cucumber sandwiches and cups of tea you could stand a corpse up in type of wake or the sort that forces those wrestling with a harrowed, rawbone ache to shake hands with an averted gaze and sympathetic shoes, but a proper ‘do’, a celebration of a full-span life, mottled with its share of strife and scrape, peppered with purpose and lively liver spots, where the skeletons are more interesting than the closets and the china is chinked like battle-scarred armour. So, let’s skip the cemetery, the shallow grave speech from the unfamiliar preacher while we pick worm-mulched mud from beneath our nails. Let’s save on the heating, cut the cremation, the lip-synching of hymns, the scattering of ashes beneath the sapling limbs of a strategically placed yew. The phoenix is a fallacy; nothing ever rose, scented from the pyre but the stink of crisp skin, the wraith of desire as it whimpered unnoticed. Let’s lay this body down in the meadow, on a table cloth of butternut sunshine, squashed between cordials, bathed in a changeling breeze. Open that bottle of Merlot we were saving, let it breathe the scent of campions and daisies that thrive beyond the dried bouquet. Allow the sun to slip smoothly down the neck of the sky, instead of wrangling with darkness as it steals the day. Unwrap our picnic of cherished remnants while Bacchus opens our throats and we lace our memories with melodies and verse. Let’s sleep, arms wrapped around it in the dewy night air, beneath a blinking coverlet of unknown mischief, until it’s time to wake. |