AT YOUR GRAVE

by Martha Landman

Arthur Rimbaud 20 October 1854 - 10 November 1891

I’m the only visitor today,  
small cemetery, speechless graves,
Your mailbox at the gate is full of fan-letters,
as if you’re the tooth fairy or some god.
 
It is wet and cold and my shoes 
gave me hell on the walk here.
Tomorrow I’ll wear my sandals, rain or not.
There’s lots I could ask you, but not here,
not today where you lie helplessly dead
on a peaceful summer’s afternoon, 
violet eyes shrouded in eternal sleep,
in the same plot with your mother 
and seventeen-year-old Vitalie.
 
Come to the cobbled square with me tonight.
Let’s dine and dance and have a quiet beer,
no absinthe, no hashish. Afterwards we’ll walk 
along the river Meuse under chestnut trees, 
past the mill, step into the tanner’s little boat
at the quay. Let’s sail into the flimsy air, 
set the night on fire, our reflections on the water,
you melding into me, the moon our lamp. 
Let’s write formless verse about our years in Africa,
mine as a child, yours as a merchant, explorer. 
I promise I won’t ask what I know you won’t tell
           —why did you give up poetry?


Martha Landman writes in Adelaide, South Australia on unceded Kaurna land. Her first single collection like scavenger birds was published by ICOE press, June 2023. Her poem “Girl From the Underground” (for Arthur Rimbaud) was highly commended in the WA Poetry d’Amour contest in August 2024.

ALTERCATION IN ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

by Jerome Betts

The war-time dead, thanks be, sleep sound
Where laid to rest in hallowed ground
Immune to campaign cheers and boos
Or use by self-obsessed yahoos.

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the quarterly Lighten Up Online.

MISS CISSY TEACHES A MATH LESSON

by Sandra Anfang

George Floyd as a boy with his mother Larcenia, known as Miss Cissy, who died on May 30, 2018

.

My son George is dead. We lie 

under the earth in a quiet Houston

cemetery where we grieve together. 

All of Minneapolis is grieving.

Twenty-seven months from now

we will still be grieving.

I heard him call out for me

as he struggled for eight minutes

under the knee of the white cop

My name is tattooed on his belly.

We are connected at the core.

In twenty-seven years we will still be grieving.

I used to love the number twenty-seven:

three times three times three.

The number of black men police kill

each year has not changed since I died.

Twelve hundred sixty-five of my babies have

been felled, and they are all my babies.

Here they said. Take this money in exchange

for George’s life, but that won’t bring him back.

I cannot balance this equation. 

Three point three: the number

of millions our family was paid

for every minute that white cop 

pressed his hate into George’s neck.

Just forty-six, he was a dad and grandad.

The city has wiped the crime scene clean

but our pain is an indelible stain.

Money is a powerful mop. We will use it

to help the cause of black folks everywhere.

That white cop must be locked away

if that’s what it takes to end 

this circle of slaughter.

Sandra Anfang is an award-winning poet, poetry teacher, and editor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including San Francisco Peace and Hope, Spillway, The New Verse News, and Rattle. Her two chapbooks Looking Glass Heart and Road Worrier were published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Xylem Highway, a full-length collection, was published by Main Street Rag in 2019. Sandra teaches with California Poets in the Schools and hosts Rivertown Poets, a monthly reading series, in Petaluma, California. This poem was born of the twenty-seven-million-dollar settlement for George’s life by the city of Minneapolis this week.

VANDALISM AT A MILITARY CEMETERY

by Janice D. Soderling

Dozens of Commonwealth graves have been daubed with swastikas and other symbols at a cemetery dedicated to those fought in the first and second world wars. The headstones were vandalised with red spray paint overnight at the Haifa war cemetery in northern Israel, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). It comes just days after several other Commonwealth graves were knocked over at Belfast City Cemetery in Northern Ireland. —The London Economic, October 11, 2019

Indifferent to the clangor at their tent,
the dusty lads sleep on.
Allied in unilateral descent,
indifferent to the clangor at their tent,
and to the tiffs of kings or president.
Unmindful of thick darkness and bright dawn,
indifferent to the clangor at their tent
the dusty lads sleep on.

Janice D. Soderling, poet, writer and translator, is a previous contributor to TheNewVerse.News. Her work in Spanish translation was recent at La libélula vaga and her own translations from Swedish to English are forthcoming at Better than Starbucks.

STEALTHY BOMBERS MIGRATING TO VERMONT IN FALL 2019

by Tricia Knoll

A federal report on the noise impact of F-35 jets on the area surrounding the Burlington International Airport is delayed again. Noise exposure information due from the Federal Aviation Administration regarding the F-35A Lightning II stealth fighter jets was due in December, then February. Now, according to airport officials, the information will be publicly available—tentatively—next month. —Burlington Free Press, March 14, 2019

The cemetery and the dairy face off against each other
on the winter-potholed two-lane road that runs
between two towns that aren’t really very big.

The F-35s are coming to the most populated part
of the state with the politicians’ blessings. On those wings
hang jobs, a possibly spotty safety record, and cost over-runs

that bring the war machine to where
the cemetery and the dairy face each other
on a first warm spring day.  The flags

in the cemetery reflect winter tatter
and the pasture grass for the cows
is brown. Someone on the radio

states that the new planes are four times
louder than the F-15s that left town
on Saturday, but whose brain can multiply

sound and decibels well enough to imagine that?
Suspicious why the FAA hasn’t issued
those sound maps, where the four times

as loud will be suffered. One man half-heartedly
blames the government shut down. The kids
in the school haven’t had their exercises yet

for when the noise terrifies them. They are
busy having their regular old active-shooter
drills. Even when the pasture grass is brown

and the flags on the cemetery are winter torn.

Tricia Knoll lives directly in the flight path of the F35s that will be stationed at the Vermont Air National Guard. She is a poet who is very tired of war machines, bellicose wall builders and those who seek to jail young children. 

POSTCARD FROM HOPEWELL CEMETERY

by Kathleen McClung

A Michigan woman accused of stealing flowers from local cemeteries that authorities say she used to decorate her home has been sentenced to jail. [She] was arrested after someone saw a car full of flowers leaving a cemetery. —The Detroit News, July 24, 2017

Such lavish praise on nearly every stone.
Nobody ever cheated here, I guess,
or bounced a check, defaulted on a loan,
or lit evictions with a black Zippo. Success
blooms here in jelly jars of peonies,
hibiscus, orchids, mums. They go to waste
each Tuesday though, when short-timers turn keys
on mowers, ride around, bring home bouquets
to wives. (My ex did once, ten years ago.
Then he left town with Viv.) On Monday nights
I make my rounds at dusk. I drive real slow
and pay respect, then load the car—blues, whites,
and fuchsias, sweet ceramic bowls the shape
of shamrocks, doves. They match my couch, my drapes.

Kathleen McClung lives, teaches, and writes in San Francisco. She judges sonnets for the Soul-Making Keats literary competition and hears the poetry in people trying to make ends meet.

DEATH COMES FOR THE COMMANDANT

by Bruce Dale Wise

Castro will be buried at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in southern Cuba. Photograph: Jonathan Watts/The Guardian.

        "Cambiar de amos no es ser libre..."

                —José Martí

The flags are at half-mast, beside the palms out in the air.
The Sun is shining over Revolutionary Square.
The people stroll about, meandering. Not much has changed.
The silence shows. The individuals are rearranged.
The statues and the towers, still, remain . . . another day.
The avenues, the walkways, and the latest news are gray,
as are his ashes, his cigars: Fidel Castro is dead.
Havana cannot hold him longer in white, blue, and red.
It's time to go, to leave the capital, alone, uncoil,
to Santa Ifigenia in Santiago soil.

Bruce Dale Wise is a poet and essayist who writes under various charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms). The creator of new poetic forms, like the tennos (10 lines of iambic heptametre), his publication credits include magazines and ezines under his own name and various pseudonyms. This tennos is an example of his docupoetry. Among poets he admires are Cubans José Martí and Nicolás Guíllen.

NOT READY TO BE SILENT

for James Baldwin

by Carolyn Gregory

“The week started with scenes from a cellphone video of an African-American man lying on the ground being fatally shot by a Louisiana police officer, and an astonishing Facebook Live feed of a woman in Minnesota narrating after her African-American boyfriend was killed by an officer during a traffic stop. It ended with horrific live television coverage of police officers’ being gunned down by at least one sniper at what had been a peaceful march protesting the police shootings.” —The New York Times, July 8, 2016 Photo: A spray-painted mural on a building on Foster Drive in Baton Rouge, La., on Thursday, where Alton Sterling was shot to death by a police officer two days earlier. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times.

No, I do not want to be integrated
into a burning house
where the roof collapses
and firemen die in the rubble,

forced to stay silent when
the sirens fly by in the dark
and guns shoot the innocent.

I do not want to live
in a field of burning red poppies,
shocking in their color
against fallen gray homes
bombed down to bedrock.

My life means more than this.
I am not ready to walk silent
into a cemetery to lie down
with all the unnamed dead.

Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Main Street Rag, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ygdrasil, Seattle Review. Her first and second books were published by Windmill Editions in Florida.

MEMORIAL DAY

by William Cullen Jr.

Relative places flowers at one of the tombstones in the Los Angeles National Cemetery (then the Sawtelle Veterans Cemetery), where flags were posted for Memorial Day, 1940. This photo was published in the May 30, 1977 Los Angeles Times.

We walk down the rows
in a Civil War cemetery
like we were inspecting the troops
looking for one particularly
outstanding soldier
to pin a medal onto
instead of laying down flowers
in the pouring rain
on a great-great uncle whose name
escapes both us and his headstone.

William Cullen Jr. is a veteran and works at a social services non-profit in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry has appeared in *82Review, Canary, Gulf Stream, Right Hand Pointing, Spillway and Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics.

REQUIEM

by Ed Bennett

FALFURRIAS, Texas (Reuters)  May 15, 2013 - Mounds of dirt decorated with fake flowers sit at the northern edge of the cemetery in this town about 80 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Small metal placards mark the graves of the unknown, generally by gender, while others simply say "bones" or "skull case." Photo credit: REUTERS/Eric Thayer.

Quietly,
in the twilight breeze
of an unforgiving desert
we few are arranged
in a mourning group,
a broken minion
for the passing
of the nameless ones:
a young mother
or older sister,
a boy about eight

found between the cholla
and voiceless stones
that hid them from the road
where La Migra rules
and the crosshairs of
the militant ones
guards a sanctified border
in the darkness.

We left water
every mile or so
on the hidden route
where they sojourned,
the brown skinned tribes
of new Israelites
short one Moses and
a caring God’s sight

where the guardians
cut the water jugs
and these two died,
tongues swollen,
a mile south
of the springs.

Coyotes lament
to the waning moon,
a song for souls lost
in the eternity
of the killing night,
the calculus of death
for a too young woman,
a boy yet to live.

Adios,
nameless friends,
may your days be cool
beside Eden’s brook,
the fruit of God’s heavens
be your eternal bounty.

And may our days be riven
by our lost contrition,
may the appeals of patriots
weaken in the echo
of this desert marked
in the blood of innocents.


Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.

PICKING UP A HITCHHIKER IN MAY

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

"The burial of the dead is Humanity 101."
—Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet, NPR, May 6, 2013

It’s messy when they die
in winter, he says. The dirt
is too cold to work with then.
I tell him I will consider this
when I die. Just give me two-weeks’
notice, he says, quoting a joke,
and it occurs to me humor
must be an unwritten
prerequisite for a grave digger.
I ask him what he thinks
about the recent uproar in Boston,
no one wanting the bomber
buried in their own backyard.
Well, he says, I’ve always thought
we should have a special section
for the politicians. We could put
him here with them—in a place where
we let the dogs run.
In the space before I laugh,
I remember the story
the undertaker told about how
in the middle ages they considered
suicide the ultimate crime.
But since you can’t punish a dead man,
they took out their ire on his corpse
and buried it at a crossroads
to be trod on forever. He said,
“If we do not take care of dead humans,
we become less human ourselves.”
The man next to me says,
“You know, I give every person I bury
the gravedigger’s promise.”
We are almost to the cemetery gate.
“I say, I’m the last person who’s ever gonna
let you down, and the last one
who’ll ever throw dirt on you.”
He laughs a laugh so real
I can smell the earth thawing in it.


Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poetry has appeared in O Magazine, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and in her children’s lunch boxes. She is a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. Favorite one-word mantra: Adjust.

MARS

by Howie Good

The god of carnage has grown

a balding man’s stringy ponytail.

Red, he says, means danger.

He shrugs his cruelly thin shoulders.

A tractor stands abandoned

in a field of what looks from here

like black puddles of blood.

The future will burn a full 40 days.

We will walk beside our coffins.

Starvelings will stare out

from behind barbed wire.

Mothers will shriek. There will be

nice grass in the cemetery.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.

YPRES

by Howie Good                            
                                      
                                            for Sarah M. & Tom C.

Tyne Cot cemetery on the Ypres Salient, Belgium.

Despite
a cold
misty rain

poplars
stand
at attention

as

we wander
jet-lagged

down rows
& rows
of gravestones

40,000
stubby
white teeth

bared


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love Dagger from Right Hand Pointing, To Shadowy Blue from Gold Wake Press and Love in a Time of Paranoia from Diamond Point Press.