Poem A Day #5

Somewhere

This is the somewhere

We were always trying to get:

Landscape

Reduced to the basics:

Rolling mills, rocks, running

Water, burdocks, trees living and dead. (1)

Somewhere the dead

are buried under humps of dirt, somewhere

a white cross perches with faded plastic flowers run

over on the highway by drivers who will rush to get

somewhere unimportant. A basic

necessity of burial:  warm landscape

soft enough to dig.  We walk the land, scope

out our future with planted trees, no dead

ancestors among us. Basic

survival skills are burdock roots, some

flower stalks harvested before they get

to bloom. Tree bark stripped off as runners

to make canoes, stone faces stare at us from the bank. We run

into landscape.

Some day we will elope to a new place, get

dressed in red and tie ourselves to trees. The dead

and living surround us.  Somewhere

in our pockets lie changes.  BASIC

programs run on a green screen. Basic

codes run all life forms.  Somewhere someone runs

deep into the forest.  Ferns unfold.   Some ask where

they are but we see another landscape

appear on the screen.  Death

sleeps under down covers.  No graveyards to get

creepy with.  Graves are fine and private, we get

consolation in the land of Elysian, a basic

right of passage with manicured lawns, the dead

no longer gone but sweetly singing under running

water, weeping willows, the statuary landscape

attracting tourists with guidebooks, draped urns, winged cherubs, somewhere

over the rainbow death got lost.

This is the somewhere we exit, back to basics.

Run to the stonecutter, chisel our own mortality.

1 – opening stanza quote is verbatim  from “Daybooks 1,” Two Headed Poems, Margaret Atwood 1978.

photo:  Burdocks Arctium minus

I started this sestina on Wed in our sestina class when I had students write a sestina using a line or first stanza of another poet's poem.  James Cummins (one of my favorite sestina troubadours) gave me the idea for this with his poem #22 from his book "The Whole Truth."   The last three lines of the sixth stanza are also celebrations of Walt Whitman's view of cemeteries, from his biography.