534 - The Death of a Next-Door Neighbor

The Death of a Next-Door Neighbor
By Gail White

So poor old What's-his-name is dead!
I'm quite surprised. I take it hard.
I might have known he wasn't well
from all the crabgrass in the yard.

The pastor and the press announced
"he leaves a gap we cannot fill"
and in some stuffy room his heirs
are quarreling about the will.

The house he paid for thirty years
(complete with lawn he liked to mow)
is sold; the buyers have agreed
that wallpaper has got to go.

His children decorously grieve,
but they have troubles of their own,
and even his widow is relieved
to find how well she sleeps alone.

The seasons change, our block forgets,
but where impersonal thunders roll
the Court of Heaven in judgment sits
on What's-his-name's immortal soul.

Gail White is a poet, living, as she says, in a "New Orleans Victorian house with my historian husband and a black cat. My personal religion is largely Neo-Platonist Christianity, with a dash of Mahayana Buddhism." She is the author of a book of poems, Irreverent Parables (Border-Mountain Press, 1978).