I Read My Poem at My Father's Funeral and Nobody Clapped
They were supposed to. That's how I knew it worked.
I practiced it forty times in the car. I timed it, three minutes and forty seconds, which is how long the drive to the crematorium takes. I read it out loud to the steering wheel and I cried on the word 'shoulders' and I got it out before the roundabout so I wouldn't have to stop.
I had it memorised by the funeral, which is what you do when you know your voice will break and you need the poem to hold you up.
I stood up at the lectern with the folded paper in my hand and I didn't need it. I looked at the people who had loved him, the ones who knew him from the factory, the ones who knew him from the street, my mother in the front row with her hands folded the way he used to fold his, and I read the poem I had written for him.
It was about the way he held a cup of tea with both hands, like the warmth was the point. It was about the sound his keys made in the door at six in the evening. It was about the specific way he said my name, like he was still surprised I had turned out to be a person.
When I finished there was no clapping.
Not a sound. Not a shuffle. Not the polite ripple you get at a wedding. Just the quiet of a room of people who had just heard the man they knew described so exactly that they had nothing to say back.
My cousin squeezed my arm as I sat down. My mother didn't look up, but her hand found mine and her hand was shaking. A man from the factory I had never met pressed a folded note into my palm on the way out. It said 'that was him'.
I understand now that the silence was the applause. A poem that makes people clap is a performance. A poem that makes them quiet is a mirror. I had held the mirror up and they had seen him in it, and there is no clapping for that.
I still have the folded paper. I never needed it, but I keep it in the same notebook as the poem. The poem was for him. The silence was for me.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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