Flanked by kin
Holding up the stretcher,
The white sheet charting your casing like the afternoon mowing down inner cities.
The mosque hurling the compassionate to your side
To temporarily wreck their composure
Uncovering how you were a pillar of the community,
Your tenants took a furlough from their inflation adjusted lives
And stuffed their mouths and shot their feet under the flash of cold showers.
Doorbells ducked into tin-foil wraps,
Dirty dishes into slumber parties going through laminated albums

No one said it was your penchant for red meat,
Or the hostility of habits to diabetes,
It was remember how he used to keep to himself mostly, but was a good man.
It was he is survived by his wife, five children, and ten grandchildren,
The likes of who will gargle the holy water used to bathe their wounds.
–

A reading of the third part of The Waste Land

‘The Fire Sermon’ is the third section of T. S. Eliot’s ground-breaking 1922 poem The Waste Land. Its title is chiefly a reference to the Buddhist Fire Sermon, which encourages the individual to liberate himself (or herself) from suffering through detachment from the five senses and the conscious mind. You can read ‘The Fire Sermon’ here; below we offer a short summary of this section of Eliot’s poem, along with an analysis of its meaning.

‘The Fire Sermon’ opens with the River Thames, and a description of the litter that was strewn across its surface until recently: during the summer, the Thames was full of empty bottles, cigarette ends, and even, it is hinted, contraceptives (that ‘other testimony of summer nights’). The ‘nymphs’, we are told, ‘are departed’. The meaning of this is ambiguous: on the one hand…