The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Don Colburn
Burial Ground near Piney Branch
You come upon it suddenly, no sign,
a fastness in the woods just off the fire road on the way to Little Devil Stairs. The woods are thick with sassafras, greenbriar and shagbark hickory but here give in to airy otherness, outlined by stately Norway maples around the square stone wall. Within, more separate stones, upright or tilted by weather and their own weight, time’s heft. Step inside the iron gate, take time to be alone with them: headstones, field stones, polished, rough, some that barely clear the ground. The chiseled ones bear names like Bolen, Gaunt and Clatterbuck— folks who settled these hills and hollows before the feds drew boundaries around and through—and benedictions cut in stone against eternity: Asleep in Jesus . . . Gone Home . . . Thy trials ended, thy rest begun. Hyphens stand for lives between the years, deciduous as autumn leaves. Do the arithmetic: this one at seventeen, that one a ripe old fifty-two, and over there a child born on the day she died or dead the day she was born, you choose, you tell the story now. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |