Here is a poem I wrote twenty five years ago after seeing a production of Hamlet...
After the Memorial Service for Pat this afternoon, with three words changed it seemed to fit.
Poetry is like that...

Stage at the End of the Play:

Columbarium

Utter pregnant blackness…

like the stuff we all come out of, and go back too, I imagine,

awaits… What a pompous uncomfortable word that is,

the magical illumination of the stage by light

piercingly more real than sunshine

and the strutting projections of priests

reciting thoughts wise as a grandmother’s.

Art is here made moment by moment

and lost forever in seconds following

the speeches, drowned lights and fallen curtain

if, indeed, Mona Lisa is there after I leave museum.

But I much prefer to believe

no curtain is ever the final one,

in spite of what the critics say.