Directions for My Funeral: (Written After the Burial of W. B. Yeats)

If I should happen to die from home
Let the Irish Navy leave me alone:
Let some good undertaker be selected
Who’ll take my bones to the spot directed.
The usual cousins tribe can follow,
But I stipulate in the way of sorrow
Let my chief mourners be Hayes and Hogan
Then a coach for De Valera.
For by then I’ll be a national hero,
(A bicycle pump if you find him flat
Will inflate the poor man enough for that)
And then in surplices and miters
Our new lay abbots, the Irish writers,
And Patrick Kavanagh to lead the lot
Moaning “I never knew a girl like that,”
(But let the girl stay from it
In case I feel the need to vomit;
Let me go with Sean to drink malt or Beamish
With the rest of my friends in some pub convenient)
Then take me to the Ulster Border,
And beg me a home from the Orange Order.
A pillar of stone both tall and slender
Frank O’Connor & “No Surrender!”