Decoration Day

Mockingbirds sing
in this rural
Southern graveyard
where you now lie
amidst engraved
stones, some broken,
some legible though
weathered cryptic
by rain, drought, cold,
spring and fall winds—
always by time.

The post oak’s green
leaves—beneath which
lie voices once crude
and now long stilled—
shade the tall grass
where your dark hands,
which had stroked your
son’s fevered brow,
then sewn bluegrass
on his grim grave,
now lie buried.

As when we walked
here, while laughing,
you speaking of those
you had once known,
again, I imagine
faces, lives—old men
mowing June hay,
stern old women
paring apples—
their deaths covered
in periwinkle’s bloom.

Do you recall?
I ask anyway,
as if again we
were walking here.
And I leave for you
these fresh flowers
taken this morning
from my garden.
I will go now;
it is hot, and
black storm clouds gather.

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