Cemeteries: a Sixling

monumental museum

temple and public park

fine and quiet places*

of  picnics and meetings

college study, sex, and

Día de los Muertos

feasts of deaths’ favorite

foods, bottled soda and

booze; sugared skulls, dancing

skeletons, musicians

and family groupings

toasts to health, libations

                                                                                          

to the northern borders

where trick or treaters come

ready or not, too old

for childlike innocence

too macho for coven

new year celebration

their shotguns guard homelands

unmarked graves in wastelands

where grieving is silent

and oral tradition

coexists with myth of

blame and causality

at the nine eleven

memorial, city-

scape replaces desert

three-thousand miles away

and world trade replaces

blood sports of sitting ducks

leaning and weeping walls

surround cultures of death

shrouding the corpse's age

and sex, symbols of faith

in the box and in hands

folded, ready to pray

Reposted for Poets United " Poetry Pantry - #121."  Originally posted for "Theme Thursday for October 25, 2012 - Cemeteries."  The photo is mine.  

*from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": "The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace."  (Also "A Fine and Private Place" the title of a Fantasy novel by Peter Beagle.)

Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast.

Submitte, revised for Poetry Nook