{"id":5990,"date":"2015-03-20T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2015-03-20T09:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cvm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=5990"},"modified":"2015-03-20T09:12:32","modified_gmt":"2015-03-20T09:12:32","slug":"dust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cvm.org.uk\/blog\/friends-of-cvm\/dust\/","title":{"rendered":"Dust"},"content":{"rendered":"

APOLOGY: This blog was originally published with the last line missing … oops, the blogbot must have eaten it! Please read it again and relish the significance of the last few words.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

Read this:<\/strong>
\nWhat good is it for a man to gain the whole world and yet forfeit his soul?
\nMark, ch 8, v, 36<\/p>\n

Recite this out loud:<\/strong>
\nHe swung a weird brass bucket to and fro\u2014
\nLike a bucket, but not quite.
\nSomething you would never really know
\nOutside the rather alien rites
\nAnd technicalities
\nOf the undertaker\u2019s trade,
\nIts equipment and its practicalities
\nWhich, ostrich-like, we prefer to evade.<\/p>\n

He must\u2019ve pulled some little trigger-thing
\nAnd out there flowed a stream of dust,
\nLike emptying a Hoover, carpeting
\nThe patch of crematorium that\u2019s just
\nReserved for scatterings.
\nDeftly, he missed his smartly polished shoes.
\nYou might wonder, does it matter if
\nIt\u2019s scattered here or there. Is there anything to lose?<\/p>\n

But my mother, then was saying through a screen
\nOf tears, \u201cNear the flowers, or we won\u2019t remember where.\u201d
\nAnd on the grass it settled, grey on green.
\nHope softly smothered in a layer of despair.
\nUnfortunately as the years have gone,
\nTogether with the dust that was my dad,
\nMy mother\u2019s memory\u2019s become
\nJust a memory. Steadily she\u2019s losing all she had.<\/p>\n

It matters less then, if the flowers live or die.
\nShe won\u2019t remember what or where.
\nAnd his eighty-seven years of life\u2014
\nAchievements, friendships, obsessive, crushing cares\u2014
\nBeing pulled down a slope, clawing vainly at the grit,
\nBy the thief who stole his sight, his hearing and his touch,
\nThe disease which took relentlessly, his senses, bit by bit;
\nNot rich but neither poor\u2014fine, he never asked for much.<\/p>\n

Is that it, that really it\u2014<\/em>
\n \u201cOver by the flowers so we\u2019ll know another day\u201d,<\/em>
\n But she\u2019s forgetting anyway?<\/em><\/p>\n

But he knew and served The Lord for forty years,
\nA steel-worker tempered, not destroyed
\nBy alternating, fiery trials and cooling tears,
\nThen to his carers singing shameless hymns of joy
\nAnd amongst his final words, \u201cI\u2019m not afraid\u201d
\nAnd then to sleep till clocks forever are re-set.
\nAnd then to rise, complete, refined, remade.<\/p>\n

That’s<\/em> it–or, “By the flowers, or we’ll forget”<\/p>\n

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