Middlemarch

Last Friday, in Middlemarch, they put Peter McElhinney in the ground.

It was a big do,

in the Strath Taieri War Memorial Hall they gathered from 10 o’clock on

After the lambing beat.  Big men stood together outside,

Arms knotted, clenched fists white with grief, or the cold.

In elastic-sided boots they talked about the weather

And looked past each other at the huge blue Maniatoto sky.

Inside they set up a trestle table for the coffin and lined it up

With the red duct-taped lines of the badminton court and lit the pot-belly

With macrocarpa, that bled black smoke through the lid, like it always did (until

It got going )..

And his niece served up “Amazing Grace” from the base-line

In a suitable vibrato. Then they took him and put him back in the ground

That his parents had raised him on 67 years ago and that he had worked ever since.

And his sister, the singer’s mother, did sausage rolls.