Three Generations At Most

July 7 2020

Between the monuments and obelisks

tombstones and markers,

gravestones, headstones, tablets, and plaques

there is neatly manicured grass,

crushed gravel paths

connect the plots.

Verdant lawns

extracting carbon dioxide from the air

nutrients from the soil.

Shallow roots

reaching down

to buried relatives

and bringing them to light.

Oxygen for the living

beauty for the eye.

A cool green jewel

enclosed by stifling streets.

Where black tarry asphalt

and acres of concrete

soak up the city heat,
sun-drenched cars 
are too hot to touch.

It's quiet here,

except for the birds

in the cathedral of trees,

the muffled hum

of shunting cars and diesel trucks

that imperceptibly recedes

the further I walk.

I strain

to read the fading epitaphs

engraved in weathered granite

and tilted marble slabs.

That are slowly being erased,

just as drip-by-drip

falling water carves rock
into smoothly scoured shapes.
So when they are eventually worn away 

and their words no longer legible

the dead

truly will be gone.

Whose interred remains

have long ago

returned to the soil.

Who are remembered

for 3 generations at most.

I am grateful

for this convenient escape,

this refuge and sanctuary.

For having been reminded

that this, too, will pass.

The summer heat.

The strutting birds and verdant grass.

My own brief sojourn,

and whatever transient mark

I will have made in the world.

Really, this poem was never going to be about death. I was originally intended to play with the irony of a cemetery in a stifling summer city: a charnel ground for the dead acting as a cool green oasis for the living. The morbid turn came on its own, and all started with the grass extracting its nutrients from the soil: in an indirect way, recycling the dead. So both the tension and intersection between the living and the dead ended up informing the rest of the piece. Not that I think an acute awareness of death is morbid. Rather, I think it enhances life: with drive; with gratitude; and with perspective and humility.

I used “shunting” cars to get at the idea of stop/start traffic. One thinks of shunting trains and arterial shunts. So my usage is, at best, an approximate one: good enough for poetry, but perhaps not enough to withstand close scrutiny! Anyway, in Googling it, a listing came up for Urban Dictionary. It turns out – no surprise – that “shunting” is urban slang for sex. Which prompts the immediate suspicion that, according to this unimpeachable source, every conceivable word is somewhere slang for sex!