Tomb It May Concern

A single engine plane nosedives into a Montana cemetery and a single brain-cell suicide bomber detonates his or her deadly ego at an Iraqi funeral. These twin graveyard calamities recalled to mind Thomas Hardy's great poem, Channel Firing, in which God is forced to inform his awakening dead that the noises disturbing their eternal sleep are not the trumpets of Judgment Day, as they had assumed, but merely cannon fire from warships out at sea. They can lay rest assured, he tells these trembling and confused corpses, that the Hour of Final Reckoning will be a much more pleasant experience altogether than what they have just heard.