Our Sexton

Even these 2 days later, I still reminisce on Paula’s service (Saturday). These thoughts are like the trailers after a college LSD trip. Call them post funeral trailers.
Might you wonder what the those PFT's may look like?
They look like this:

Our Sexton

I walked past the choir room closets
  where the pressed altar garments all lie still,
And the wobbly standing ironing board
  where she straightened the white collars
  with soft sprinkles of water distilled,
The room was too quiet,
  no angelic choir practice sung today,
And it struck on my just how quickly
  these soundproof church room do grow old

Away I saw the Sexton,
"She should be here"
"She’s gone now"
"She was just here…"
"She’s in the garden, I can take you"

We walked past the beds where fall flowers were planted,
   which she cut for bouquets that, presuming the altar guild granted,
   she placed in the chancel on Sundays,
I saw each scissor cut had healed
   spurring on shoots with new blossoms blooming,
Growing wild in their glory abandoned,
  The benefit of her compassionate pruning

"I can see she was here"
"She’s in the garden"
"This isn’t the garden?"
"I’ll take you"

We walked on past a tree under which bark mulch had been spread,
  where once she told me she buried a pigeon she’d found dead,
There she dug a little hole,
  put the soil back in place
Bent her leg and took a knee
   And coo’ingly spoke pigeon grace

"That burial was very like her, really quite understated"
"I know she’s here…"
"She’s in the garden"

Next we walked through a gap in a split rail fence
   to a yard hedged with thorns, burning bush, trimmed and dense
As he pointed to the ground he said
   "There, she’s down there"
Where upon I looked seeing only
   a smooth polished granite square,
By which I could only squat and feel the carved letters,
   cold as the iron in the choir room,
   cut off as the flowers she placed on the altar,
   out of the way, as the pigeon beneath the tree,
Here are all the attributes, that never were as she,

"This is our memorial garden," next,
"I planted her. Sextons’ garden too"

I returned to my welcoming Church knowing she had died,
Yet who sojourns to a beloved one’s grave
  without believing
    that there
     we would meet again…?