Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, PRAIRIE GRAVEYARD, by ANNE MARRIOTT


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

PRAIRIE GRAVEYARD, by                    
First Line: Wind mutters thinly on the sagging wire
Last Line: In the centre of the huge lone land and sky.
Subject(s): Cemeteries; Prairies; Graveyards; Plains


Wind mutters thinly on the sagging wire
binding the graveyard from the gouged dirt road,
bends thick-bristled Russian thistle,
sifts listless dust
into cracks in hard grey ground.
Empty prairie slides away
on all sides, rushes toward a wide
expressionless horizon, joined
to a vast blank sky.

Lots near the road are the most expensive
where heavy tombstones lurch a fraction
tipped by splitting soil.
Farther, a row of aimless heaps
names weather-worn from tumbled sticks
remember now the six thin children
of a thin, shiftless home.

Hawk, wind-scouring, cuts
a pointed shadow on the drab scant grass.

Two graves apart by the far fence
are suicides, one with a grand
defiant tombstone, bruising at the heart
"Death is swallowed up in victory."
(And may be, God's kindness being more large
than man's, to this, who after seven years
of drought, burned down his barn,
himself hanged in it.)
The second, nameless, set around
with even care-sought stones
(no stones on this section)
topped with two plants, hard-dried,
in rust-thick jam tins in the caked drab pile.

A gopher jumps from a round cave,
springs furtively, spurts under fence, is gone.
Wind raises dead curls of dust and whines
under its harsh breath on the limp dragged wires,
then leaves the graveyard stiff with silence, lone
in the centre of the huge lone land and sky.





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