Who were they kidding? Themselves for their sins?
Or the man with a tripod calling say cheese
to these old fashioned guests with their fixed wooden grins
in the coffin shaped shadows of pollarded trees?
Sometimes they seem no further away
than the lift of a veil or the drop of a hat
or the time it might take for the bride’s bouquet
to hang in the air before being caught
while the groom, exposed, not ready yet,
is cupping his hand after cadging a smoke
from his rakish best man whose waved cigarette
is flourished around another blue joke,
tasteless, unsavoury, so un-PC
that the dead all around laugh uproariously.
