REMEMBRANCE

"Out of pain, and pain, and more pain, we feed this fevered

plot" ~ Mary Oliver

I remember going back and forth along the road from Paris to Dresden,

a road often traveled by my grandfather's grandfather in another lifetime.

I held the precious hand-drawn map marked with tiny crosses,

indicating family burial grounds near the old homeplace in Tennessee.

Little did I know the road had been moved a century before.

Somehow, a narrow path under a stand of cedars opened, beckoning me.

I walked through knee-high weeds between depressions in the red earth,

My cousin told me about the unmarked graves,

those of slaves whose names are long-forgotten.

I found stones with familiar names, spoken long ago,

and the grave of a baby born in 1862, after the war began.

He died two years later, never having lived a day in peace.

I felt grief, not just for him, but for my great-great grandmother

who suffered such a private loss while her world went mad.

Each grave, marked or not, holds memories, secrets,

traces of tear-stained dust,

and I feel the pain of freedom lost, or freedom never attained

until the grave became the portal to a promised land.

I feel the pain of voices silenced on the road from Paris to Dresden.

I feel the pain of lives lost and promises never kept.

I feel the pain which fed the fevered plot

where nothing grows on unmarked graves.