Graveyard poems

Decomposition

What do the dead become

in decomposition?

By definition, they are no longer

“they”

but something different, an expansion–

or is it a reduction?–

of molecules used

to feed the dust.

In feeding life, do the dead become it?

Is one what one nourishes?

Or do they lie, still

dead

only surrounded, permeated

perforated by life?

 

Reconstitution

Poems always find me in the cemetery.

Something in the smell of the earth

and ripeness of trees

contradicts the idea of a stagnant casket.

 

I imagine they speak to me,

voices muffled by silent air,

muttering truths they know now they’ve gone,

Death having pointed them

toward a greater Constant.

 

Try, they say,

to believe everything we didn’t.

This dust can only reanimate

our flesh and its nutrients–

the material stuff of ourselves,

not what lasts beyond. 

 

Their words stir a question

and I see it etched into the trees,

their silent beneficiaries:

If the earth brings bodies back to life,

who’s to say our souls can’t rise from dust

resurrected to light

by similar substance?