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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Memory Day

I went back once
to that place of solitary stones.
It is a city of little boxes and violets.
Cars wind in and out of gravel lanes,
and always
there is a mound of flowers,
gladiolus, lilies, roses.
It is a smell too sweet to be pleasant.
An omen of someone’s leaving.
A mystery without inscription.
A stone will be raised later,
and someone will carry a single flower,
or a cloth of tears,
and stop for a moment
to listen to the traffic from the road.

But that will come later,
perhaps years,
perhaps never.
No one comes for pleasure.
No one comes for silence.
It is a city without noise.
The sound of the world outside
is the light above a tree,
a touch of fading warmth,
a memory stopped by time,
a piece of the heart forever severed.

I read the inscription on the stone
by her grave.
I’ve forgotten what it said,
something that tried to appease our grief,
chase away the fog.
I wonder why we do this to ourselves?
Build a sarcophagus of grief.
Put wrought iron fences around graveyards.
Pretend we have no guilt for dying.

She is a hurt wind,
a broken laugh,
a barren feather,
put here as if her soul
is now a box of decayed ash,
her memory,
the heavy odor of death.
Let’s dig all these places up!
Let’s scatter the stones.
Let’s go to the top of a hill
and look into the distance,
and say,
that is where they went,
faster than light,
alive and well,
into the future,
into forever,
laughing,
without pain,
flying.

Published inIndex of all Poems