When there will be no next of kin present at a funeral, a custom‐written poem is recited by a renowned poet. What does one write for somebody who is no longer known to anyone? In Amsterdam only, a yearly average of fifteen people die whose funeral will be unattended. Be it nameless people, or people with a name, but with one thing in common: there will be no friends or family at their burial or cremation. Led by poet F. Starik a group of Dutch poets, Menno Wigman and Maria Barnas among them, have united in the ‘Pool of Death’. They accompany the lonely deceased to the grave by means of a poem specially written for the occasion. In the documentary Poem of Death we follow the course of such a ‘lonely funeral’. We see the municipal civil servants organise the solemn occasion; we witness how the people at the funeral parlour care for the corpse and the coffin, and how the poets prepare for their recital at the cemetery. There is often so little information available that it is not clear how the deceased ended up in his isolated situation. Perhaps by choice or by circumstance; nobody will ever know. The poet is therefore compelled to interpret; to invent. In an evocative visual manner, Poem of Death gives us insight into the incomprehensible turns a human life can take, focusing on that last stretch between the death and the burial of a person who may no longer have been known in life, but who will yet be remembered after death.