Visiting the Graves
by Andrea Potos

They chose simplicity in small bronze
plaques set into the earth,
raised letters for their names:
my mother, her sister, her mother
and father, her baby brother—oldest
and most burnished:   1935-1939.
My feet sink into grass sodden
from last night's storm. The air is thick
with song—cicadas strumming in tall oaks,
their insistence of late summer leaving.
The marigold bed my grandmother wanted
gleams with orange and ochre yellow,
and I think of Van Gogh, his words
to brother Theo:    Even in pressing darkness,
There is a sun.



(previously published in Marrow of Summer)


 

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