Children Danced on His Grave
Don Hynes
The funeral was on island time, even the dead guy was late;
the hearse a green four wheeler driven by his friend
with an old tape deck playing Afro beat music.
As people gathered, the hand wrought pine lid
was lifted from the coffin and there lay Tony
laid out and calm with a peace we’d all know.
Old friends greeted one another,
children poured across the cemetery field,
the one room school let out for the internment.
His adopted daughter began the story circle
her tears watering the ground of his burial,
telling how years ago Tony escaped his native Budapest
clinging to the undercarriage of a train,
a revolutionary act to tyranny but just one of many steps
in a journey toward a place where he could be himself.
Friends spoke of his gamesmanship, his trickster,
his love for the cast off and castaway, akin
to his own life that arrived on this distant island
carried by the mysterious tide of freedom,
the rough cut gem of his unique soul in search
of a setting where he could love in his own way.
A single purple flower was placed upon his chest
before the pine lid was replaced with its antique cross,
then the coffin lifted down into the deep hole.
His old friend pelted him with a few stones
assuring Tony’s love for a prank was honored,
then the circle wrapped him in his last blanket,
the sandy loam of his adopted island,
the grave filling slowly, shovel by shovel,
friend by friend, each taking their turn.
When the dirt had risen a few feet it needed to be tamped
so a few adults jumped in the hole to step down the dirt,
a clear signal to the waiting children and they jumped in
filling the grave with laughter and gaiety, dancing
on the dirt over Tony’s coffin again and again, writing
an epitaph worthy of a soul who had travelled so far, so well,
a man so himself that children danced on his grave.
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