IN DEAD EARNEST, Lee Hays

If I should die before I wake,

All my bone and sinew take

Put me in the compost pile

To decompose me for a while.

Worms, water, sun will have their way,

Returning me to common clay

All that I am will feed the trees

And little fishes in the seas.

When radishes and corn you munch,

You may be having me for lunch

And then excrete me with a grin,

Chortling, "There goes Lee again."

'Twill be my happiest destiny

To die and live eternally.

When Hays died, his ashes were mixed in a compost pile.

William D. Hamilton

I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

It was not to be; Hamilton was buried in Wytham, Oxfordshire.