I KNOW HOW A POEM ABOUT GOING TO THE CEMETERY BEGINS
Saša Radonjić
detail from: KRK Art dizajn
I KNOW HOW A POEM ABOUT GOING TO THE CEMETERY BEGINS
It begins like this With something being forgotten
I brought everything To clean my father’s gravestone But I forgot a bottle of water So, in the shade of a conifer bush Where a small pile of unmelted snow remained I scooped up a modest lump with a cloth
I did not know that cemetery snow Could be so cold, and that's why my fingers Would so quickly begin to go numb And tremble as if they believed in the afterlife
Among the dead, I feel better and better Because I have belonged to them since August 2009 And here I am, only temporarily working among the living
And the cemetery demands more dead So today, the silence I usually breathe was absent
And the great cemetery demands more dead So, at its edge, several excavators and trucks Are making a new field for mounds and monuments
As they move in reverse They produce that warning sound — beep, beep, beep Like the digital devices That monitors heart rhythms Beside the pillows of the gravely ill
I know how a poem about going to the cemetery ends Which is large, beautiful, yet so disturbingly hungry
Luckily for it, the excavators and trucks will feed it
