My name is Podrig Otuma and I'm very glad to be from a place that has particular death rituals.

And the poem we're going to look at today makes reference to ancient death rituals.

This last summer I was doing some teaching and there was a guy in the class from the Romance-speaking part of Eastern Switzerland.

He was a Protestant minister and he told me that in one of the parishes where he works,

when somebody has died, it isn't the minister that welcomes the family into the church

for the funeral service.

It's the family who had been bereaved before that.

I thought it was a beautiful ritual.

Death rituals say so much to us about the way we want to live and primarily death rituals are to help the living

keep living. I love that. It's a note of defiance and tenderness and care and love that we show

to each other in the midst of difficult times.

Neanderthal Degh by Don Mackay.

When we dug up the grave, we found a child's bones laid on a great swan's wing.

They had never been, we thought, the sharpest flints in the cave with thick skulls evolving toward NFL helmets. We'd applied their name from Neander Vale, sight of the first remains we found, to racists, sexists, and dull bureaucrats.

Now we stood abashed, trespassers on grief, thoroughly sapiens with artful implements and wit. What would it be like to be so

stricken with few words to call on heaven, hell, hope, grief? And what sharp words might we,

the clever cousins muster for the child who one day watched a mute swan,

wingspan, five feet, lift from the river in two white swipes of paleolithic air.

What manner of wreath might honour this death, some weighing of language entering earth?

Wherever you've gone, may your spirit wander, wild as a swan, in the veil of Neander.

Music in the Vale of Neander. Don Mackay titles this poem Neanderthal dig, which gives us an indication of the start of some kind of archaeological exploration.

Neanderthals are our very early cousins and we are all made up of our early ancestors.

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