Music is the Heart of Sorrow.

No my friend,
Your guitar is just too raucous for
                               such moments,
Cutting through the silence of the
                                       mourners
With a cruel jest,
A screech that mocks the inevitable.
Today we have been forced to remember that
Your hatred of Swan Lake had once facilitated
Your conversion to Heavy Metal.


This spare electronic music screams
A parody of sweetness
Through the hushed congregation
Blotting out the morning bird song
With corrosive quadraphonic sound;
                                       But
The soft gestures of the swan are perfect
                                      To express
                                      With piety
Such immeasurable desolation.


The wounded swan
               (An arrow in her breast)
Soaring one final time
                 Before falling,
Touches the heart profoundly;
Unlike the bland informality
Of this agnostic funeral rite
Accompanied by such dissonance and fury.


Farewell old friend,
You deserved a chieftain`s burial,
Not this clinical transformation
Into a heap of ashes
Inside a gas fired furnace.


Better by far that, on this cold September morning,
You had been folded gently into the earth
Unencumbered by the legacy of your music.
Rock a byed asleep in the loving arms of Gaia
Much as the wings of the wounded swan fold gently
Over her shivering body
To hide her time of dying.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 17th. - 18th. 2014.
July 17th. - 18th. - 20th. 2015.

Remembering a funeral lacking dignity and blighted with inappropriate music. The funeral took place at a utilitarian crematorium, all plain glass and off white concrete. The surrounding countryside was a picture postcard mixture of gentle hills and deep woodland rich in wild life.