Grand Old Friends

The gravedigger knows the smell

Of blood and ash and bones too well

They stand in solemn, dead man’s-graves

Yet their chests still fall and raise

A day of flirting with fatality

Ceremony without the grim reality

And therefore this rare and sparse race

Can recognize death’s skeletal face

And when death has a twinge of guilt

He’ll go to where gravestones sit

And talk to the cemetery king

Whose voice croaks like ravens sing

And when gravediggers meet their ends

Death greets them as grand old friends