I Stopped By Their Headstones Again

Today I stopped by their headstones again,

Down a ways from where new mourners kneel

Beside baskets of lilies, roses, creeping thyme

And, of course, the dark hole, always a shock,
Wide against the mound of fresh dirt and mulch.
The small places that will take us all back.

What lies beneath this wormy grass is not them,

Not the buffed beings with clear coated nails
we still know well from the pictures: 
The handsome sun lovers in uniform, the newly
Baptized and Confirmed, women in see-through gowns,
Holding babies or kittens, waving from new cars,
All these life-loving toiling hearts, unprepared.

All that’s left of them now lays here underfoot--

Rows of ripened bodies, rubble, skulls, trinkets, 
Dried flesh, tangled hair, hooked nails, wax--before

They were caught in one of their usual hangouts

At their designated hour, to be hollowed out one day

Like so many small Pompeii’s or even scooped up
By incandescent beings into an uncommon world.

Copyright (c) 2012 Ellen McCarthy. All rights reserved.