GRAVEYARDS AND AIRPLANES

I can still feel the smooth marble or the crumbling tomb stone under my youthful fingers as I ran through the ancient graveyard. I can remember looking into the vandalized dark boxes that once held the deceased, and thinking where did their bones go? Memories of our minds, some clear and timeless and others clouded like the night, seem to define the spaces of our existence.

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. ~Pierce Harris

Graveyards and Airplanes

A dense memory
of pure white clouds once was
drawn by blue crayola crayons
on construction paper.
Flying in and out of
of a girl’s fairytale life;

a worried hand with
a flesh colored band-aide
wrapped tightly around
her index finger knows
of life and death. She pretends
to know how to draw the 3 cotton ball
cumulous outside her Delta airplane
window.

On the ground,
memory plays in an old graveyard
behind her house.
Children
lying silently still on the granite box
tombs where weathered names
from the 1800’s were
replaced with their own
prone bodies. It was a game;
a grown-up game of life.

Like angels,
the clouds floated by,
a silver solitary airplane as their guide.
Her eyes the only movement known
to a young soul as she waited to be
found, found in peace.