A Pathologist Reading at His Mother's Funeral

Adlestrop was the poem he chose,
Learned at grammar school, yet unclosed,
Along from the asylum
Where a young woman, working late, was killed –
It made the papers for quite a while,
Under pressure from her father,
Now long gone and the story with him.
He made it to the funeral,
Squeezed between her death,
Expected but a surprise nevertheless,
And a symposium in Switzerland
(Expenses but no fee as it happens).
The tears, he said, caught him unawares,
Forgetting, as we must,
That we are stalked, lifelong, by sadness;
Not for our glinting hopes, now turned to rust,
Nor for loves and lovers lost,
Nor for parents duly mourned,
But for that sunlit minute at the platform’s edge,
The shaft which bears the message
That, even now, we are but dust.