Untitled

In a graveyard of crumbling
bones, lichen blemishes untended
stones, erases brief life stories
of the dead waiting for the world
to turn back. Their remains
have succumbed to worm
and maggot, but their souls
still dwell in established heartlands
and monuments, splashed with light
that shifts with overhanging leaves,
are touchstones for the afterlife –
order in the natural disorder.

Kim M. Russell, 22nd August 2019

Invisible Friends

My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads A Guest Appearance from Kenia Santos: Post-Rock, also linked to dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night

Kenia’s back in the garden with some bands I know, some really well . This is the kind of music we listen to in our house.

For today’s challenge, she asks us to choose a song from the list she has provided and use it as inspiration to write an untitled poem, incorporating the song titles in the body of our poems.

42 thoughts on “Untitled”

  4. Such a good poem. My favorite lines:
    “crumbling bones, lichen blemishes untended stones”
    and
    “splashed with light that shifts with overhanging leaves”
    Cemeteries are peaceful to me, and you’re right, the touchstones are important — to both worlds. My dad was cremated and sits on a sibling’s shelf in an urn that I haven’t seen since he died in the 1990’s. I do visit my grandparents’ and other relative’s headstones and it helps with the conversations.

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  5. What an excellent poem. Puts me in mind of the cemetery surring the Church of the Holy Innocents. Idid quite a bit of research on it and discovered it had been so over buried the ground was mucky with rotting bodies and it stank. This eas before the relocation of bones into the ossuary benesth Paris.

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    1. There are quite a lot of graveyards like that in Europe. They’re fascinating. Nunhead Cemetery in Southeast London, where some of my ancestors are buried, is like that, overcrowded, bones rising to the surface, broken headstones and tombs.

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  10. Having searched for long gone relatives graves in England it can be a long and difficult task! A few years back I had to take the ashes of my wife’s mother back to England so that she could be buried in England close to her husband who died there. Luckily I was guided by staff to the right place.

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  18. Wonderful write Kim. Where one’s life energy goes, no one knows. We all have out hopes based on our perceptions. But the energy is not destroyed, because energy cannot be destroyed — so we all wonder and speculate. Meanwhile we all are here, now, and aware — that is a true miracle.

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  21. Markedly untitled reflecting markers erased of titles, but you see still the persons there, the erasure the decomposition, but still the waiting, nothing, including the poem itself, depending on the name. I agree this is very satisfying

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