Grave Site

// David Sutherland

Next year I plan to bury only roses,
sepia colored flowers whose healthy
petals in hand exfoliate no lesser omission.

But Life plants only surrealists,
spring’s ghostly wafts and tender stalks
whose frail dispositions falter at bloom.

Others boast a more rugged constitution,
the burly oak whose visage affronts
its creator beneath stormy skies.

Tastes aside, these graves now seeded
loved ones, grow only liturgy,
The moldering sentiment and

propitiation of a missing divinity.
Our Priest pronounces sentence,
“Here rests a good man!

Beneath thorn and bush.
The husband, father, child of another
in a wreath of April’s girlish cut.”