Liam Guilar's 'After the Funerals'

This poem is taken from 'Rough Spun to Close Weave'. A listener asked for the text of the poem as well. After the Funerals one by one they take their leave; parting without formal courtesies startled by the shock, again, as one by one they take their leave. Affection, understanding, even knowing what there was to value, come too late: gifts delivered past their use by dates. 2 The plane strains upwards in the night, banks, and there, below the city that we thought we knew; drab streets, a park, its monuments, some houses where the welcome meant we didn’t want to leave, revealed as glowing labyrinth: vast, intricate and beautiful. Too late we realise, again, how much there was to learn before the detail disappears, becomes a pool of light shrinking to a faint glow in the skies behind us as we head towards another dawn. 3 So one by one they leave stories that I didn’t understand and now forget, lives whittled back to facts and dates no one contests or verifies. Box brownie photos in an old shoebox? Left trying, once again, to reconstruct a map I never stopped to memorise.