Produced by Dennis Camire

This week’s poem is by Thomas Moore of Belfast. The poem is from his collection “The Bolt Cutters,” published by Hemlock Press.

 

Maine Burial Plot

By Thomas Moore

 

Granite posts square a God’s acre, a tiny

Plot of blueberries and asters beside a crushed-

Stone drive to three new houses on the shore.

 

The black slate headstones vanished a few years

Back, pretty pieces for a garden in New York

or maybe it was kids one night in a pick-up

 

Drinking Bud Light who tipped them out, then

Regretted what they’d done and dropped the stones

Into a gully. Somebody knows. The names

 

Are erased except on a tax roll or a family tree —

Hardscrabble farmers working thin soil over

Ledge, the husband cutting shingles at a mill

 

Or wrestling granite or shaping white oak

Futtocks for a schooner in Castine. The new

Driveway skirts a rough-cut granite cellar

 

Hole grown up in popple, the apple trees gone

Wild, the only sounds a clunking hoe, the gulls,

The wind, a washboard’s splash and thrum.

 

Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu

Copy the Story Link