☀ Today's Poem: "The Funeral" Felicity Sheehy

What we learned the day of the service
was that the reception had been moved
out of the church galley down the hall
to the third-grade classroom, decorated
with cut-out Christs and handprint turkeys,
a motto hung over the door: Be Good.
The priest showed us the way, sweating
and swinging his bad leg, explaining
we'd thank him later for the air conditioning.
Inside, the desks were shoved to one wall,
and a fold-out table perched its legs
by the blackboard. We arranged the pictures
at the front of the room, where they looked
from their June barbecues and Florida vacations
at the concrete out the window, gently steaming.
Back in the church, the fans were running
so loudly we couldn't hear ourselves
and the readings evaporated in the rafters,
where the only things listening were the faces
of window saints. Towards the end, the priest
made a joke about the coolness of heaven.
We followed him back to the classroom,
which now held an array of danishes
and cardboard boxes of coffee ("Half-off
from TOPS," he said). I drank cup after cup
of decaf, lightening and lightening
and lightening them with cream, watching
the silent pictures watching us. How little we
had in common. Their whole world had ended,
while somewhere ours continued, past the flat
voices and the shuffle around the room, past
the borders of this town, where the fields fill
with the flashlights of so many people
looking for each other, flooding the skies
here, floors and floors beneath the stars.