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George cemetery
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This seems very apropos right now.

Unveiling

In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live,
my aunts and mother
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows,
almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walking beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don't feel sad, exactly,
just left out a bit,
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I'm not quite ready yet
to learn.

(By the way, the tombstone in the picture belongs to a great-aunt - my grandmother's older sister. Note the dates.)

(Because I'm in a poetry mood, for whatever inexplicable reason. Do I need a reason?)

The angels
in the corner
crowd this postcard,
ready to fly
wherever the mails
might take them.

They have the scrubbed faces
and the gauzy hair
of my daughter's friends
in high school chorus,
their cupped mouths brimming
with hallelujahs.

Wrapped in the reds
and golds of cherubim
those rough girls too
dreamed about boys,
and when van Eyck was done
grew up and married them

and died. Today I pin
their picture to my wall
where the bronze notes
of the sun's great harp
can strike them
back to song.

-- Linda Pastan