One Poem, and That’s It

I don’t write much poetry.  I think I hear a sigh of relief…  Poetry is so personal compared to other modes of writing.  It may be too much to inflict it on an unwitting and largely casual audience.  But blogging’s like that…

I still come back to this one, written a few years ago.  It means something to me. I feel like I hit where I aimed, within the narrow confines of what I’m able to do.

A little preamble… The District of Kent is an agricultural area in the lower Fraser River valley, perhaps two hours drive northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia.  Its main little town is called Agassiz (pronounced AG-as-see), which proclaims itself to be the corn capital of Canada.  They grow a lot of corn, and grain.  Most of the land is flat and in the floodplain of the Fraser River.

Rising up now and then from the flat terrain are small rocky hills.  When the river does flood seriously once in a long while, these hillocks are islands of rock and trees.  On one of these bumps in the landscape is Kent’s old cemetery.  There’s a newer one, closer to town.

The first pioneers of European heritage came to live and farm in Kent in the late 1800s.  (This is a young province, that way.)  They were laid to rest not far from where they worked the land.  One noon hour, on a beautiful early summer day, I went to look.

Cemetery Mountain (Their Gift to Me)

at the Kent Municipal Cemetery
unused with a couple of exceptions since 1936

bushwhacked once or twice a year by the local historical society
to keep the undergrowth down

on the steeply sloping hillside
bracken ferns
sway
over brush stubble
decades-old pine and fir
arise amongst the graves

~

their bodies were lifted up here

the old folks
the children
the beloved wives and husbands

to keep them from the waters
of the floodplain
to keep them safe

~

up the sunlit hill, past big chestnut trees
and the soft sound of the wind
I wander between worn granite headstones
granite crosses
family plots rimmed by stone or iron boundaries
askew, toppled

adult and child-sized concrete mounds
submerged in the hill
mother, daughter, father, son

~

towards the top rest the first farm families
their names on the roads that cross the farmland
just below

if they could see
I know they would appreciate
tall aspens trembling in the breeze
greenwooded hills
and the gray and white mountains
thrusting into blue

I look at the loveliness of the world
for them

~

leaning over a headstone, I brush the forest litter
from the engraved and mossy letters

Jenniset Marden, gone in 1915
only three years after her 10-year-old Llewellyn

          next to her
husband John followed a few years later

all gone

~

all the stories
forgotten or never told
are in the ground here with them

their wordlessness fills my heart

in not so many years
the headstones too
will be unknown

~

farther on
in the shade

on a cross-engraved unnamed tomb
a fat garter snake
flashes his forked tongue
pulsates with breath
and slithers unhurriedly
into the forest

~

a large yellow butterfly dances
down the breeze
over this cemetery hill

~

at the bottom
looking back up

I feel the presence of that hillside
and weep
without being able
to say why

~

later
walking in a meadow
I found I had long forgotten
the sweet scent
of white clover

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