The Family Plot
There are a few sad graves in our family,
but none for fire murderers, none for childhood stuck
and broken off like the granite tree trunks
set in old days above a stripling's resting place.
Old age mostly took them out, and if they were bitter,
and if they raged as my grandfather did
against failure, still they had time for hot spring days,
for love, sappy or dignified, for the excellence of action
and for rest. You couldn't say they didn't get their share.
There's a dead baby beside my grandmother,
a boy born dead, exhausted before he arrived here,
too tired to live, but he'll never know what he missed.
And off there near the flowering camphor tree
my cousin, who blew his head apart, lies a brief distance
from the others, across a grassy gap
his parents will someday occupy. He was the saddest case,
mad, a boy starving at the feast, unable
to leave home, resourceless, impounded
by fear. Under creamy granite
carved with a bible verse, he mans the frontier of our plot,
first of a generation, last of a line of thought,
keeping his uncomplicated vigil before the cannons of the dark.
(c) 1995 by Charlie Smith. All rights reserved.
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