A Good Man is Forever
In life he had been quite and unpretentious,
He died in the same way; quietly and without fuss.
Yet all the papers carried the news of his death,
Lionizing him after he ceased to draw breath.
Although he had risen to the top of the civil service
Being chief secretary when he demitted office,
It would be no exaggeration to say that
He was not the typical bureaucrat,
Having always played with a straight bat.
Being upright, he hated anything underhand
And when called upon to do so; could take a stand.
And now he was dead, the funeral was at 9:30
Too early in the day for me unfortunately.
I knew I would be late and so I was
Punctuality not being among my many flaws.
To save time I drove past the cortege
Reflecting on mortality and old age.
But my sad reflection were interrupted
By a traffic light, annoyingly red.
But traffic lights can’t stop the dead,
They are only meant to harass the living,
I thought, as the cortege went by without stopping.
I finally reached the cremation ground
And joined the mourners milling round.
They look the body to the crematorium,
A depressing building, grilled and grim.
And that was the last I saw of him.
I thought the dignity of a funeral pyre
Would have been more in keeping with my desire
But perhaps his unassuming nature
Had ruled out even this final gesture.
As I drove back nothing had changed at all
There were the same slogan on the wall,
The rusted tanker in the derelict yard
Stood unmoved; like a soldier standing guard,
And the daily-wage laborers near no. 10 bus stop
Were still lounging about Salim’s tea shop.
Yet despite the quotidian and the banal
Something had changed after all.
The death of a good man had affirmed his credo
The things that we should not forget often do
The values that will never cease to matter
To some people. For want of knowing better
I put it down in my halting verse
A good man is forever , in spite of the universe.
