POEM: FRAGMENTS

Fragments

Body bags rip open, spilling their bones.

Father Gillespie prays, clutching his jones.

Tattered flags are brought back, patched, from afar
like dead-letter days once  wished on a star.

Young Susie Salesclerk begins her last rounds.

(She’s just found Jesus in old coffee grounds.)

Singers in alleys, criers in the streets—

Choirs of churches dying for retreat.

Sands by a desert, water by a stream;

Patient by a window wakes from a dream:

Inland there's fever; fire's in the air.

Past the shoreline--icebergs--float by everywhere.

Babies in dumpsters, fallen like the leaves.

Truffles in wine sauce; champagne makes you sneeze.

And so, to sum up, here's our epitaph:
What's heard by the dead is summoned in their wrath.

WELL, I READ THIS GOLDEN OLDIES AND DID SOME EDITING, and still I’m bummed out and depressed. I guess the title has something to do with it. The word, "fragments" doesn't suggest a warm, kumbyya around a campfire, does it? And the poem is fragmentary in the images presented: a priest examining the bodies of soldiers returned from war; a salesclerk’s religious conversion; drunks singing in  streets (though the line could have other interpretations, I guess); half-empty churches;  a patient waking up to a new reality; environmental disaster, aborted babies, decadent rich—in other words, business-as-usual. The images would fit nicely in my “News of the World” poems, with snippets of this and clippings of that, with things that stab and slash, or at least prick and cut (or paper-cut) us; those things we do and see every day.

The priest (another priest!) looking at bodies spilling out of body bags, having to clutch at his bible or rosary, or anything to keep his faith going, I thought was a fairly powerful image, suggesting the ‘centre no longer holds’ (it’s spilling out). It contrasts with the new-found faith Susie discovers in pile of coffee grounds.  

I like the image of a patient looking out of their hospital window and seeing fires raging across the horizon, and icebergs melting in the harbour. Was the patient sick because their world is sick?

In the next stanza, the image of the most precious of life—newborns—discarded like garbage juxtaposed with truffles, a ghastly over-priced fungus being served at dinner. Skewed moral values are on full display. The poem ends with the dead's "final wrath". Their wrath is their decay, the evidence that all our works and days will eventually be for naught. All our doings—the good, bad and the ugly—will be swept away someday by Death, the great leveler of saints, sinners and everyone in between. Whatever we imagine for our epitaphs will not matter. All the comforting words and images of ourselves that we hide behind will be exposed as futile.
Thus, the fragments of our lives are all that we have. In between them, and what comes after them, is nothing. So it behooves us to make each piece--no matter how small and insignificant--as polished and shining as we can. Jeeze! No wonder this poem bums me out!  
So, what to do, what to do…?

Well: Live each day as if it were your last. Love, instead of hate. Drop one less baby in the garbage. And war? How about nappies instead of napalm. Prayers instead of wishes. Compost heaps instead of carte blanche. Do's instead of done's. Hymns instead of hums. The list could be considerable. Feel free to add to it. 

Cheers!