Sunday, February 5, 2017

Sunday Poetry Corner Feb 5

Last June, I spent three weeks in South Mississippi and the surrounding area, driving along the coast and anywhere the friend I was with chose to take us. We saw a lot of old, ruined graveyards so overgrown by brushes and trees, brambles and thorny vines. I still have the faint scars on my legs from getting tangled in one while picking blackberries on a dirt road. It was a beautiful experience, but it was a shame to see these tributes to the dead in such shabby condition. In places, stones were broken and so moss covered you couldn't read them. As we drove away from one such site, I wrote this poem on a napkin from the seafood shack where we'd had lunch earlier in the day. It was a great lesson in always keeping a notebook handy, even when the plan had been to go to the beach. (The image below was taken at the cemetery that inspired the poem.) 


Earthbound Angels

It’s not enough
To bend without breaking
In the dawn
We laugh at earthbound angels
Crumbling beneath
Savanna summer suns
Where kudzu clings
In leaching vines
Choking even ruined remains
Of old houses of worship
Swamp claimed
Sinking in bubbling marshes
We all drown
In cattails and kool-aid
The echoes of pasts
We’ll never understand
There’s no honor
In remembrance these days

Or anything really.


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