Graveyard Birds

My grandmother says that my brother won't change
until our father dies
and like the black and evil birds
that gather in graveyards
(the proverbial murder of crows)
we, the children of
his car-crash marriages,
come to claim his house,
to sell the naval engineer's worldly excrescence:

the scratched and broken DVDs
collected and pointlessly stored
back when his last wife died,
the tankard and the GRANDDAD mug
I bought him on a whim,
the entertainment centres and
other bibelots of engineering craft;

I wonder if there's anything
he keeps just out of sentiment.
He's not that sort of man, really.
And nor are many men
of his particular province,
in time and place and class.
(The British upper-lip, ornate
and still.)

The crows tap-dance across his tomb;
not joyfully, but in that idiot rhythm
of animals moving
across human structures,
of which they're ignorant.

Are we really that awful?
We love, but in that muddled
stupid way of crows tapping their feet,
without thought
or even melody.