Ossuary

Jan 28 2016

After so many years

the bones are disinterred

and consigned to a charnel house.

While the flesh has returned to earth

and friends are dead

and relatives long departed;

except for distant ones

who will not remember.

In our prayers

we talk of eternity, reverence

amends.

But we are temporal,

and humility 
becomes us best.

As in everything, an end.

The bankrupt graveyard.

Precious papers

burned in the fire.

Old tapes

machines no longer play.

And most of all, fame.

I lead a small life

with no illusions of consequence.

So it’s odd                                                     

how bone persists.

Ossuaries, older than millennia.

Ancient bones, rattling in their boxes,

yellowing, hard

anonymous.

I will grind them into dust

and work them into the soil.

Fertile earth,

like the flesh they once wore.

Apparently in Europe, our North American concept of a graveyard as an eternal resting place does not apply. You contract for a certain amount of time; then the remains are disinterred and your place given to someone else. Your bones end up in an ossuary, or charnel house. I suppose when the first settlers arrived in this vast and limitless land, they saw endless space for the dead. There was no such luxury in the cramped cities from which they came.

I heard this on one of my regular podcasts, Planet Money (NPR). Then, on the next one I listened to (The Moth) there was a delightful story about an encounter in a graveyard. As I’ve said before, I try not to write about death (because I am preoccupied by morbid thoughts, and I fear every poem would contain the words “dead” or “die”!) But I suppose these two pieces worked on my subconscious, and when this poem emerged like automatic writing, I went with it. And it’s not as bleak as one at first might think. Because there is, for one, the notion of continuity and unity in returning to the earth. And then there is the laudable notion of humility:  a useful counter-weight to the solipsism and self-importance of our individualistic culture.