This poem employs literary devices of allusion, association and pun to locate the commonplace concept of death as a journey in a geographical setting; a ferry ride between two islands. The poem attributes ancient motifs to contemporary life and revisits the idea of Charon as a worker, in order to acknowledge the ordinariness of the passage to death. The literary devices relate this poem to a tradition of poems about death, even as the intention is to remove the traditional association of grief and fear. To ‘inter’ is to bury, and the poem employs a grammatical pun on the official name of the regular ferry between the North and South Islands of New Zealand, where ‘inter’ operates both as a prefix meaning ‘between’ and as an active verb.