Graveyard

This poem came to me over Christmas break, 1998-1999. My dad, brother-in-law and I were looking over some acres in rural Mississippi where Dad was hoping to hunt.

Having walked through the woods for a while, we came upon a clearing piled high in the center with bulldozed trees. My brother-in-law and I enter the pyre where the branches arched as if to form a cave. The sky seemed a close, solid grey, and every sound we made reverberated in the silence. I guess I began writing the poem when the first branch snapped under my feet and finished it hours later over hot chocolate at my parents house.

As a concept, “Graveyard” is one more entry in my growing list of unfinished things. I wrote this poem in 1999; I hope to have it illustrated in 20091. I want the storyline of the illustrations to tell a narrative not rigidly connected to the words in the poem.

Certainly there are images the text suggests, but what I want is for the pictures to tell a good story. The words can just be there as A Capella accompaniment.

Although the illustrations are not the sort I envision for this poem, Susan Jeffers’ illustrations for “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost exemplify the relationship between words and image I want this to have. Perhaps it’s a pipe dream that’ll never happen, but hey! so is the rest of this site.

Graveyard

we should walk the woods
to the graveyard of the trees
where the mighty lay fallen and silent.
we could climb their rigid bodies,
the drying bones snapping under our fumbling feet.

how I wish I could go like an Indian,
sleek and still as I snaked beneath the shadows
of a dark wood.
I would wear silence through the undergrowth
and take you, ever so quiet,

to the graveyard of the trees
where the mighty lay fallen and silent
with their hair loose on the wind
their arms breaking to the barren sky
their bones baking in the mud and winter
go where they lay
mighty and fallen and dreaming

of when their dry bones danced
and greened themselves sleek
and lithe like an Indian
in the spying shadows
of a cold and winter sun.

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Filed in Poetry | About This Entry

Dec 1st, 1998 | By Justin Brock | Category: Poetry