(With the whoop of the mourners on the field,
under the marquee and the shaded dais,
the deceased man’s daughter, grief-seized, collapsed,
weeping, is in the arms of a quick man,
removed lest the father’s spirit remain here
wondering about her. The catafalque of wood and golden silk
collapsed in the long, tearing flames;
the white bull sarcophagus and bundled corpse fallen
into a timber mess so the cremators had to step forward,
practical as sailors, technicians of an ecstasy, with their long-tubed
blowtorches working at how matter resists combustion,
at how abandonment must be forced. In that fire I see the corpse
of my father, and of those ‘comrades’ bound in tyres and torched,
hated, during our wartime. Around me the villagers dressed in white,
no longer joking or greeting as they had in the temple,
watch on. Some eat fruit, drink bottled water,
or are making small offerings. Others, watching and quiet,
attend to their memories, outside of what grief
can grasp or sight hold as a glimpse.
Until the blackened, blowtorched parcel, shrunken, crumbles.
Even the skull, a smear of ashes
and flakes on the lightly damaged ground
over which individual hands will point out
what the large bamboo tweezers should find: grey shards
to be left, out-of-doors overnight, unattended,
for tomorrow’s ceremony and their deliverance
in the nearby sea.)