Popular in requiems and funereal music, 1 Corinthians 15:55 can rouse tear-sodden lids, but sees only the rarest treatment in music’s popular genres. To dispatch with this dilemma, poet David Musgrave has infused the verse with new musical nuance in a poem titled “On the Inevitable Decline into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age.”

Due to copyright, you’ll have to read the poem’s diminutive entirely after the jump, over at the New Yorker.