Cemetery Poem
       

Sooner or later every poet writes a cemetery poem.
And, in most of them—all, really—there's death.

And life, too—grass growing, or a bird crossing the sky,
maybe some token left from the living for the dead:

a plastic toy from McDonalds, some flowers,
already wilting, a poem copied out on lined paper.

Cemetery poems mention tampons, or feminine hygiene
generally, less frequently. Ditto eggplant.

And it's the rare cemetery poem that celebrates yet deplores
the addictive qualities of the Boggle App.

You almost can't have a cemetery poem
without the word "stone": headstone, gravestone;

and in almost every cemetery poem, even the ones
that try to end by honoring life and the sublime,

there's a whiff of the pointlessness of it all,
the stony silence of non-being.

No wonder Frank O'Hara wrote about juju beans
and kangaroos! Cemetery poems can be depressing,

one-note shit, especially if you toss in the political:
mass graves, some garish anecdote of an atrocity—

dismemberment, rape, etc., which makes it all seem
worse than pointless. The point being suffering and injustice.

Then, there's the macabre, wbich is just boring,
and the mock-macabre, wbich may be more boring.

Rarely do cemetery poems battle for airtime
and interrupt each other: I've known cemetery poems

and you, my friend, are no cemetery poem.
Cemetery poems might actually be more about poetry

than cemeteries, in wbich case there's no such thing
as a cemetery poem, just poems about poetry,

but I hope that's not true because if it is,
then every poem is a cemetery.

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Copyright © 2018 J.D. Scrimgeour All rights reserved
from Lifting the Turtle
Turning Point
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission