“ A Spider Led Me To A Cemetery”
There is a spider in my car
Wholly uninvited in this space
Distracting me from an otherwise leisurely ride
Its spindly legs causing me to swerve sharply
An unfounded panic taking hold of the wheel
I cut the wheel and find myself at “Zion,”
It says
“Lutheran Church & Cemetery”
Door flung open, no longer able to find my new companion
I decide to walk
A blanket to cut the December wind
Boots to survey the frozen ground
Reading their faded markers
Gloves to forage through withered flowers
Once bright and inviting
Now decayed and deformed
I walk among them, the Margarets and Marys and Georges
Touching the ones that had fallen apart decades ago
“At Rest” they read
At rest indeed.
Surrounded by a world ever changing, ever moving, ever evolving
These corpses beneath the ground
They were somebody’s somebody
Once
Their memory lay on the tongue of the living
Once
Their unwashed clothes held a lingering scent
Once
Once
Was a hundred years ago now
Those tongues have stopped speaking
Those hearts have stopped beating
New markers are born
The ground overflowing with bodies
Holes are dug to put skeletons in metal boxes
The madness continues
The world keeps turning
The clock keeps ticking
The children keep screaming and growing and reaching for the hand of any living thing that will love them enough for the moment
So they can run past the tombstones that litter the ground and ignore the Johns and Davids and Helenas they never knew
Never will know
It’s cold
My fingers are freezing
But they are plucking plucking plucking away
Pulling the berries at the root
Grasping to save something from this place
Feebly trying to immortalize any creature still clinging to life in this ocean full of death
Where is this going?
Where am I going?
To the ground, soon enough.
To oblivion, one day.
To my own grave dug by a strangers hand so in a hundred years a child can run past the place where my bones have turned to dust and my memory is scattered among the trees and turn to read my name and perhaps for a moment wonder who I was and make up some story about my life and perhaps pick a berry from the eye of this soil and take a moment to stop the madness of living to ponder the madness of dying.
