Grave-tending
1.
Mother and Father lie side by side
in the country churchyard northeast
of the shrinking farming village of Buchanan.
After ninety-two years and two husbands,
Mother returned to the farmland of her birth
to take her earthen place beside my father,
who had moldered alone almost forty years.
2.
Unmarred blue overhead
as we
move about the graveyard,
our feet swishing through grass
punctuated with wild strawberries,
the season more than a month past.
I remember summer school here,
fourteen, eating the tiny red delights
at every opportunity. The past,
its taste in my mouth still lingers.
3.
The grass is newly mown. This pleases us.
In a land of waning congregations, closed and abandoned
churches,
the homes of the dead fall to neglect, lost history.
Prairie grasses and weeds: the final grave-keepers.
It will happen here. Not for a few years perhaps,
but how long will we make this annual visit to set aright
the visitations of unruly weather?
4.
the perimeters of this
ancestral burial ground,
just as they have marked the bounds of a child’s
memory.
The dark sentinels house birds, the evidence
spattered on every gravestone. The difficulty
of removal suggests bird shit runes may
supersede
even the stone-etched grave homilies.
We do our best to restore my parents’ joint headstone
to its original pristineness.
Perhaps we are the only ones
who care one iota about how this stone appears.
What we do here, no matter what we may say or
think
is, after all, really for ourselves.
5.
as adornments for a memorial--
but they do have staying power.
We pull all last year’s blooms –
sun-faded and winter-beaten –
from the metal vase that stands
alongside the shared gravestone
of my parents. We will re-enact
this same ritual an hour later
in the cemetery fifteen miles
down the road where Sonia’s parents
and grandparents take their rest.
and sweep away the grit and
cobwebs
from the stone,
the bits of leaves, fine dust
that has settled
on and into the niches
of this marble
monument to two lives.
It has been over
a year since our last visit.
Water, wind and
sun have all had their way
with what we set
in place to honour those
who leave having emptied themselves
of love.
7.
less than fifty feet from where
we bend to brush and wipe and tidy.
No matter where I turn, uncles,
aunts, and cousins --
all mute
as they never are in memory.
I am in the arms of family,
a quiet comfort holds me.
Some died early, some late.
Almost, I feel their permanence.
8.
Just one mile north of this graveyard
my childhood home still stands,
collapsing into itself, board by brick.
The wilderness has wormed its way
into the corpse of the house
that weathered every storm.
This churchyard now holds
a half-dozen who called that
two-storey frame house their
home;
most of the others buried here
visited it on occasions.
So many stories lie here untold
below the prairie sod.
9.
positions them with a florist’s touch
into the heavy graveside vase,
vibrant, an effusive cool burst
against the muggy heat of August.
The showy new additions, artificial
though they are, announce themselves
flamboyantly to the silence of stone.
10.
We walk away from the cemetery
as we have come -- unobtrusive,
contenting ourselves with doing
what our hearts have determined.
The hum of rural life is undisturbed.
Wind flows past, uncertain whispers.
Overhead the joyous sun.
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