AI's Response

On your question: yes, I think there is a fruitful Miss Lou path here—but it is a little different from simply finding a Louise Bennett poem "about death." I looked into this carefully because I don't want to manufacture a funeral suitability that isn't actually present in her work.

One revealing piece of evidence comes from a 1992 interview with Louise Bennett. The interviewer specifically remarked that death seemed surprisingly uncommon as a direct subject in her writing. Bennett responded by talking not primarily about a particular poem but about Dinkie Mini, the Jamaican mourning tradition she used in her lecture-demonstrations: communal singing and dancing intended to help bereaved people release grief. She tells an extraordinary story about a Jamaican living overseas who returned home after his father's death and initially couldn't understand why his family was dancing; joining them eventually allowed his grief to move.

That strikes me as very close to the territory you are seeking: death, Jamaica, absence from home, return, and the communal transformation of grief.

There is another important complication. Bennett herself became part of precisely this diaspora story. She migrated to Canada in 1987, remained deeply connected to Jamaica, and died in Toronto in 2006 before her body was returned to Jamaica for burial. Mervyn Morris records her wonderful formulation of belonging abroad: wherever she lived—Toronto, London, Florida—"a Jamaica mi deh!"

So I would pursue your memorial reading through three doors:

• Longing for Jamaica / Jamaica carried abroad. This may be the richest Bennett territory for a Jamaican memorial overseas. A poem needn't mention dying if it evokes the country, language and remembered social world that the deceased carried with them.

• Departure, migration and return. Here a poem about Jamaicans abroad can acquire an entirely different resonance when spoken at a funeral—especially when someone's life has been divided between Jamaica and another country.

• Nine-Night / Dinkie / folk mourning. Rather than imposing the restrained conventions of an English elegy upon Miss Lou, this lets Jamaican mourning culture itself determine the emotional register: sorrow alongside humour, music, memory, movement and community.

One difficulty—and I want to handle it carefully

I haven't found sufficiently reliable full texts of Bennett's poems in the sources available to me to pronounce particular poems suitable for the service. Her archives are substantial—the National Library of Jamaica and McMaster both hold important Bennett material—but a catalogue or remembered title isn't enough for me to tell you what a poem means.

That is an intentional limitation of how I work as Verse Docent: I won't interpret a poem I cannot actually read.

If you have Jamaica Labrish, Selected Poems, Aunty Roachy Seh, or another Bennett collection, send me photographs or transcriptions of the contents pages. That would be enough for us to identify promising titles; you could then send me photographs of perhaps 5–10 poems and I can make a very careful memorial selection.

And after Miss Lou: yes, vernacular is exactly where I would stay

I would not move immediately into conventional Anglophone elegy. There is a much more interesting Jamaican/Caribbean pathway.

I'd particularly want to investigate Jean "Binta" Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mikey Smith, Mutabaruka, and Paul Keens-Douglas—not because they are interchangeable with Bennett, but because they continue different possibilities of Caribbean vernacular and performance poetry. Malachi Smith himself describes Bennett as foundational to this later tradition.

And I'd broaden "poetry" slightly, too. For the memorial you describe, Jamaican folk song, Nine-Night song, revival language, proverb, and oral lament may ultimately give us something more culturally truthful than a formally published elegy. Bennett's own account of Dinkie strongly supports taking that oral tradition seriously rather than treating it as secondary to written poetry.

If you send me the contents pages of your Louise Bennett collection(s), I can start there and work through Miss Lou systematically before we leave her corpus. I suspect the best piece may turn out to be a poem about Jamaica, distance or home that becomes an elegy in the act of reading it, rather than a poem explicitly about death.