The Weight of Graveyard Earth

Come see us
at the site of the massacre

We old men and ghosts,
we plain, pale cheeked
women with eyes as
blank as steel bearings,
we listless children lying
with bodies limp against
the ground, studying the
dirt beneath our fingernails.

Come see us
at the site of the massacre

We who have suffered the
years and days of forgetfulness,
in the eyes of others,
we who are not denied, and
yet not acknowledged,
we who feel uneasy with the
strangers who move into these
crumbling neighborhoods, and
their foreign music, and how
they think we are strange and
of little consequence, and how
all the things we remember
fondly are long gone.

Come see us
at the site of the massacre

We whose job it is to carry these
thoughts down the generations,
burdensome as they may be, so
morose and so telling of the
thin veil between society and
madness, we whose stories
are burned black against the
skin like brands, and even we
grow tired of ourselves, and
the younger ones try
unsuccessfully to forget,
but nonetheless carry that
biblical weight unto the
future’s gaping maw.

Come see us
at the site of the massacre

We many hollow, uneven places
upon the ground, hidden by
taller grass, these hummocks
where the buried bodies gave
way, their space subsiding
under the strain of time and
the weight of graveyard earth,
we mutterers on dark nights,
we who survived and did not,
both to haunt long days and
nights with the curse of
recollection, always broken
for innocence.

Come see us
at the site of the massacre