Abundance of Graves
When I was a boy, death came often enough –
Grandpa, grandma, aunts and uncles.
Sometimes a neighbor, a celebrity of whom I was aware,
The newspapers told me all the time about strangers, of course
But it was an anomaly.
It was rare enough that learning of some of these deaths remain memories
Of my childhood and young adulthood.
Now there are an abundance of graves when I close my eyes.
My mother, my stepbrother, my mother-in-law added to the tally.
I told my father at dinner at his home one night that it seemed all the people of my childhood
Were suddenly dying off. It was happening at such a fast clip I couldn’t keep up.
When I would look up an actor or a writer I remembered but had not heard about in a while
They would more often than not be dead – often very recently.
My father told me it was when he was the age I am now that the realization came to him –
Every adult he knew as a child was dead or would probably die soon.
Almost every person in every movie my father watched as a child is now dead,
All his teachers, the man who owned the candy store.
Most of the adults he knew in his old neighborhood are dead
And some of their children, too.
Good Lord.
Every month my world gets smaller and lonelier.
For every ten people that leave me only one replaces them.
Ghosts float in and out of every memory, addled and full of fear.
The abundance of graves is an overabundance.
The filled holes in the ground spreading farther than the mind can fathom.
Caskets float down the river and dam it up in the distance.
Bodies stack up high on every side of me in the puddles formed by the dammed water,
Only to be stacked higher and higher
And when I am gone, even higher still.
©2022 John Tustin All rights reserved.
John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.