Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Each time I reread this poem am struck
by the dignified pathos of the final two
words. How can the ordinary become so
suffused with tragic inevitability? That is
what mourning engenders: a realsiation that
all the signs of a life are a ‘before’ and now
death brings us into a ‘after.’