RETHINKING MY KICK ON THE BUCKET
(After Kathleen Taylor’s KarmaTube@
Presentation on Rethinking the Bucket List, 7-26-13)*
Yearning for the Other Side
When death and dying are lumped together
as “kicking the bucket,” there seems little
reason for a lachrymose ritual that will cost
a lifetime’s nest egg. And yet, and yet.
A send-off at sea is as good as any–one
is flushed off the starboard to become part
of whence life came, or where it ends. Debris.
Do not send for whom the bell tolls, some
tired man holding a ready bucket of waste,
warned the unready, unprepared, or untidy.
Inexorably, inevitably, the bell takes its toll.
Like a confusing game, kicking the bucket
is nothing but a tiresome waiting game.
Let the jasmine bloom where they may,
when they may; no one has yet come back
to say if they, too, were enriched by manure
from the overturned pail, nor say, when the day
the game ends, they had no bucket of waste.
—ALBERT B. CASUGA
When death and dying are lumped together
as “kicking the bucket,” there seems little
reason for a lachrymose ritual that will cost
a lifetime’s nest egg. And yet, and yet.
A send-off at sea is as good as any–one
is flushed off the starboard to become part
of whence life came, or where it ends. Debris.
Do not send for whom the bell tolls, some
tired man holding a ready bucket of waste,
warned the unready, unprepared, or untidy.
Inexorably, inevitably, the bell takes its toll.
Like a confusing game, kicking the bucket
is nothing but a tiresome waiting game.
Let the jasmine bloom where they may,
when they may; no one has yet come back
to say if they, too, were enriched by manure
from the overturned pail, nor say, when the day
the game ends, they had no bucket of waste.
—ALBERT B. CASUGA
Reposted from my 04-26-12 “Yearning for the Other Side: (Poem #28 to celebrate National Poetry Month.
* @ See more at: http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=4029#sthash.CPPoCGkW.wBkQopiv.dpuf (Earlier shared in my FaceBook Newsfeed Status, Courtesy of KarmaTube.
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