You have toiled and labored...

Well put (a couple of the better things that I have read lately):

Mr. Malter:
"We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our live against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing mroe that the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who live that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here."

F. R. Higgins:
"Song For the Clatter-bones"

God rest that Jewy woman,
Queen Jezebel, the bitch
Who peeled the clothes from her shoulder-bones
Down to her spent teats
As she stretched out of the window
Among the geraniums, where
She chaffed and laughed like on half daft
Titivating her painted hair-

King Jehu he drove to her,
She tipped him a fancy beck;
But he from his knacky side-care spoke,
'Who'll break that dewlapped neck?'
And so she was thrown from the window;
Like Lucifer she fell
Beneath the feet of the horses and they beat
The light out of Jezebel.

That corpse wasn't planted in clover;
Ah, nothing of her was found
Save those grey bones that Hare-foot Mike
Gave me for their lovely sound;
And as once her dancing body
Made star-lit princes sweat,
So I'll just clack: though her ghost lacks a back
There's music in the old bones yet.

A question: how do you think the poem is changed by using "the old bones" rather than "her old bones"? It is startling enough that it must be intentional, so what does it mean? It goes along nicely with "That corpse" and "the Clatter-bones".

I am constantly disturbed by the punctuation inside quotations in MLA, so I am disregarding it here.

Peace.