Graveyards

This reminds me of what makes them good places to visit .... at least for some of us.

Many superstitions and fears are associated with graveyards. References to black magic and zombies were rife in popular literature and burial grounds acquired a mysterious aura. 
I remember when youngsters dared each other to cross a cemetery at night and not be frightened by the ghosts that were supposed to rise from their coffins.
But the tradition of honouring and respecting the dead existed and still do in many cultures. 
I was intrigued by the mention of parakeets in your poem and wonder if they are the ones that have made Brooklyn's Green Wood cemetery their home.
Another well crafted piece from your imaginative pen.

Luigi x

Great poem for All Souls

Particularly liked this :

"laughed out our aliveness in hungry gasps"

and

"We haunted their dusks in the hush 

behind its iron gates under the beeaches"

Much more afraid of the living -

the dead have never frightened me.

And there are other silences of the heart

and grasps of ivies that in concealments

to break free from internal deaths and memorials,

those we have lost remind us to re-emerge from them,

blanch-faced from our own entombments.

I was struck how accurate those lines are and how I can relate to them with the many loved ones that have passed. My partners two granddaughters lost their mother last week. It was such a shock to get the news because I'd only been chatting to her a couple of weeks before. She was a lovely lady and it left a great saddness.

It's strange how our thoughts change as we get older, like you say when you're kids you dare each other to enter a grave yard at night and laugh at your antics, but as you age you learn that they are not only safe places, but also sacred and where someone's loved ones lie.

Thank you for sharing this poem onemorething. Your words hold wisdom.

Jenny.

This caught some of the feelings I've had but never thought to put into words.

Really liked this: we darted the portrait galleries / of these fragments of lives / chipped into stone.

Superb. 

I was interested to read your last couple of lines that seem to indicate how easily one can hide away inside oneself to loss for others and oneself.

When researching family history often there is a just a skeleton list of names and places and dates, but occasionally more about the people themselves. And it can seem the same in graveyards, occasionally an inscription or testimony to faith that gives out more. My sister did research on Welsh gravestones where those from the times of revival had really interesting little poems painstakingly inscribed – she was actually at the time studying the difference in rhyme etc from one dialect area to another of the same basic poem! Rhiannon

Conjured lots of images, onemorething.

Lovely visual writing - light and easy to trip through (skills).

Called to mind a graveyard I stopped by once outside Uttoxeter. Climbing, bushing entanglement of ivy. I remember the parakeets along the King's Road, I think. Parson's Green, maybe. Someone did a lovely song of that name.

Very enjoyable read.

Nothing to fear from the dead, other than an early reunion.