This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people...Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your very soul, and your very flesh shall become a great poem. Walt Whitman
Scene from Trinidad & Tobago, June 2009
A body of ash smolders and a few flames jerk as a big-bellied man with shaggy gray hair shovels the pile: a body was burned earlier today. Three pyres face the water at sunset, and the park will be closing soon. The man with a wizardry beard in worker’s pants shovels the ash around, tosses the funeral bouquets out into the river. Stray, emaciated dogs lay on the concrete framing where bodies are sent into the sky. Some tug at hardened stickiness that might be food or curl up as if they’ve found a hearth, but they all lope lazily after the tenderer when he leaves his work, his long shovel-rake like a staff. Nearby, a Hindu temple floats, an island in the water accessible by a pier. The structure with its two garlic clove towers failed many times, but the priest persisted. Flags of red, yellow or black triangles lilt around the temple’s perimeter and are fixed into the soggy earth at the shoreline. Behind the pyres lay a few white graves, black crosses perching like Ospreys, and through the trees, across the street, a mosque dome peeks. I would like to walk the stone pier, lined with bushes and shrubs, sit in the chapel while the evening sun gilds even the ash, but the blue gate is locked, and I notice the old worker looking over.
A body of ash smolders and a few flames jerk as a big-bellied man with shaggy gray hair shovels the pile: a body was burned earlier today. Three pyres face the water at sunset, and the park will be closing soon. The man with a wizardry beard in worker’s pants shovels the ash around, tosses the funeral bouquets out into the river. Stray, emaciated dogs lay on the concrete framing where bodies are sent into the sky. Some tug at hardened stickiness that might be food or curl up as if they’ve found a hearth, but they all lope lazily after the tenderer when he leaves his work, his long shovel-rake like a staff. Nearby, a Hindu temple floats, an island in the water accessible by a pier. The structure with its two garlic clove towers failed many times, but the priest persisted. Flags of red, yellow or black triangles lilt around the temple’s perimeter and are fixed into the soggy earth at the shoreline. Behind the pyres lay a few white graves, black crosses perching like Ospreys, and through the trees, across the street, a mosque dome peeks. I would like to walk the stone pier, lined with bushes and shrubs, sit in the chapel while the evening sun gilds even the ash, but the blue gate is locked, and I notice the old worker looking over. 
I love the alliteration in this piece! Word pairs like "lope-lazily" and "priest-persisted" give a poetic feel to the writing. I would simply suggest expanding it to leave room for narrative perhaps in the form of an added scene within the setting described.
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