The Story Of The Laughing Son Poem by Chris Zachariou

At six o'clock
with his open casket
on their stooping shoulders
the frozen mourners shiver
and stumble in the mud.

The lilac march rises
in the sombre streets
and a eulogy draped in black
weeps silently in the censer.

When he closed his eyes
at three in the afternoon
under the shade of a dwarf lament
a moth puzzled by the brightness of the moon
sat trembling on his upper lip.

It lay in his tobacco-stained moustache
with eyes full of sorcery and sang
'la cumparsita'
accompanied by three doleful voices
of gypsies on guitars.

His mother howling like a jilted dog,
called out to him by his name at birth;
a name no one had heard since the day
the laughing son was born.

The padre ran to the house
of endless misery but all he saw
were two soldiers crossing off
his name from their list

and night's first-born child
fleeing through the side gate
disguised as a yellow moth.