Poem 24

Guess which graveyard I prefer … the different metre in the last stanza evokes the more corporate faceless feel of the modern cemetery … 

… I’m not a gardener – for thirty years this poem had the bee in a geranium … I remember the flower clearly but looking it up it turns out it was a marigold (much more rummage-able) …

( I like the headstones as carp beneath the surface of the year and the particular grit of curved concrete grave tops as grey stone lilos … )

Masterton: The Old And New Cemeteries

This morning in the old cemetery
the trees spin down leaves
on headstones pale and still as carp
beneath the surface of the year
I cradle the white marble head of a grave doll
and watch two children on a bike
lurch wildly shouting instructions at each other
around the shoebox grave of a girl
who fell asleep in Jesus
and influenza

Grave, Where Is Thy Victory?

not here in the reassembled family
mother and father and motor car accident son
of 1926 basking upside down
on their grey stone lilos
a day at a distant beach sleepily aware of death
throbbing comfortably in their ears

Death, Where Is Your Sting?

here perhaps where God inclined smiling to Thomas 5 yrs
and took him to join his angelic band?
no it's the rest of someone's life
not his death
that coils inside that one word 'only'
only child of …

I pass easily across the line
into the trimmed grass and the tidy plot
of the new cemetery
lanes affording cover as sparse as a Turkish peninsula
military grey tablets fan out like chairs
placed for a talk details clipped into their smooth sheen
that the eye slides away from
like fine print
                        condensation sweats inside
an upturned plastic bowl
                                             with the sound of burning
a bumblebee rummages through a dry marigold
death spreads across the flat lawn as perfectly
as geometrically as a virus
with planning permission