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| Gage Park |
I recently discovered that the grounds of Gage Park sadly conceal hundreds of unmarked graves that still remain, to this day (after only the tombs had been cleared to make room for the prosperous Victorian Gage family). The dead here have really no choice but to speak to the people above, and if they do it will have to be from the feet up. There's no other way of knowing that they're there. And if communication were recorded in the form of a poem, a poem's rhyme and rhythm must reflect that eerie footfall.
I should like to imagine that they will whisper to me, too. Perhaps just one of them, the youngest and most vulnerable, still clutching somebody's swollen hand. I'll take a guide with me, some local historian with map, just to be safe. I believe we bear the dead (even the pre-Confederation dead!) best singly and in cooperation. It's perhaps how we all will die...
I should like to imagine that they will whisper to me, too. Perhaps just one of them, the youngest and most vulnerable, still clutching somebody's swollen hand. I'll take a guide with me, some local historian with map, just to be safe. I believe we bear the dead (even the pre-Confederation dead!) best singly and in cooperation. It's perhaps how we all will die...
____________________
a sodden turnip farmer's thumb,
quite likely a choleraic child's last hold on life; and a shape of unaired
flounces of she who's lain near him,
or soiled hips, i.e. of an overwrought mam, who did not die of drink-
it's these stirring below me in the Park
(and not so much either as a carved letter tooled skilfully to look like
angel lips or something very uncial)
I think I'll wade among more than one of the many hundreds blurred &
stinking like the sodden, even in grief
(for what Hamiltonian in pre-Confederation woods wouldn't have been)
Of those sinking below below below are:
the shrill blowsy dress and dad who had also been lain rather pat, and,
a child dead, mud-shaped (not just a shape)
_________
2 comments:
As a boy, I had to walk to school. From grade 7-10, I attended Silverado Junior High (now Silverado Middle School). The shortest route from home to school was through a cemetery.
Many mornings trudging among the gravestones.
Always the feeling that you didn't want to walk "on" the graves--some kind of superstition I guess.
When you think about it, all of the people who've ever lived have ended up in or on the ground. So that's millions and millions of souls, whose remains have long since dissolved into the earth itself.
So where's sacred ground?
Everywhere.
Anyplace humans have lived, there are mass graves. Not people exterminated and dumped into trenches, but just everyone who ever lived, buried.
So when graveyards fall into disuse, and are repurposed, I'm not sure it changes anything.
We can dig some of them up, but the vast majority are now in the ether--no evidence of their presence, except, perhaps some bone fragments.
Thank you, Curtis
I've always believed in the type of immortality that the 'ether' assures: sooner or later we're all going to collide again (in some cool Democritean way) and swerve into different life forms.
Yes, the entire earth is sacred ground. Our history lies in ashes beneath our feet. I honour that sometimes in poetry. I really do think they sense us, as well
Peace and good health to you, friend
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