The Dead by Denise Levertov

Earnestly I looked
into their abandoned faces
at the moment of death and while
I and aged their slack jaws and
straighter waxy unrestraint limbs and plugged
the orifices with cotton
but like everyone else I learned
each time nothing new, only that
as it were, a music, however harsh, that held us however loosely, had stooped and left
a heavy thick silence in its place.