Written as a set of instructions, this poem lists the many ways people in the Neolithic might have handled the bones of their dead. Some are brutal: stripping flesh, breaking bones, sucking out marrow. Others are tender or playful: feeding the bones beer, dancing with them, burying them under the hearth. The tone stays flat and matter-of-fact, which makes the strangeness hit harder.
What stands out is how the instructions contradict each other. Bones are broken so the dead won't follow us in dreams, then the marrow is sucked out so their spirits will protect us in dreams. The speaker doesn't try to untangle this. The poem suggests that the living kept the dead close and kept them at a distance, both at once, out of love and fear.
The mood is curious, a little eerie, and oddly warm. The closing image of standing stones in a circle, so the dead will "remember us who stand in the light," gives the list a quiet, human ache: we want to be remembered, too.