At the Gravesite of Ralph Greenleaf

The image etched eternally upon your stone
Shows you hunched over, analyzing your next shot.
You've chalked your cue, now follow through.
You believe you've got all the angles figured.
Seven scuttles into the corner pocket, then you sink
Sinister thirteen.  Now you're set to run the table.
No luck involved; just skill and positioning.
Yeah, you were great then.  Two grand a week;
Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and the Prez commanded
That kind of dough. Big bucks for a pool hustler,
Especially during the depths of the Depression
But you had it all then;  charisma, style and talent.

You brought showmanship into smoky pool halls.
Your petite Chinese bride, Princess Nai Tai Tai
Proudly narrating the action ,a billiard ball ballet
Of brilliant hues cavorting across the green felt;
Mirrors suspended above to magnify the motion,
Reflecting it as dancing kaleidoscopic colors.
As " Champ," you dazzled the rubes with your patter,
Charm and an amazing repertoire of trick shots.
You were "The Aristocrat of Billiards," so handsome
That Hollywood moguls wooed you with script offers.
Life's a blind draw though; You can't know ahead of time
What you'll go up against, or what will finally defeat you.

Just when your life reached that balance point
When to pick up a cue made you feel like a king,
The balance tipped from bon vivant to boozehound.
The liquor had become as much of a crutch to you
As a mechanical bridge to a player with no reach.
A bad break or two, then some nasty caroms,
You found you no longer had all the angles figured.
Behind the eight ball, you'd hoist another highball.
The booze you boasted helped you relax before
A tourney soon became your means to escape,
A substitute for confidence, consolation
For not winning, solace for not even showing up.

You ran through your winnings as effortlessly
 As you used to run a table.  At times some semblence
 Of your majesty shown through your dishevelled rags.
 Busted for vagrancy in Arizona, you proved
 Your identity to a skeptical Sheriff by sinking
Eighty-seven balls in a row for him.  This display
Of artistry amazed cowboys who had come to scoff,
This was your last lunge for the surface, though,
Before drink pulled you under.  When your Princess died,
Decades later, her last wish was to be laid to rest next
To "her Ralph."  To have retained such undying love,
Even to your bitter end, yeah....you had been great once.

At the Gravesite of the Haymarket Martyrs

It's like a scene out of the French Revolution,
A bit unsettling to encounter in Chicago.
Resolute Lady Justice is striding forward,
Drawing her sword to protect the fallen worker
That she's crowned with a wreath of laurel;
A victim of the Pinkertons perhaps
Or of cops paid to intimidate the strikers, or
Of assassins hired by McCormick or Pullman.
Robber barons will pay the minions of the State
To serve them or to overlook their crimes.
Justice has an impossible task ahead of her.
There are so many workers for an icon to protect
That too many people only pay lip service to.

The monument at Forest Home Cemetery
Is rarely visited anymore.
A few old Wobblies come to doff their hats,
Recalling the days they sang "The Internationale,"
When they actually believed that workers could unite,
Triumph, and receive the fruits of their labor.
A few earnest anarchists, idealists and romantics
Who haven't yet had their dreams of a better world
Tasered, maced, smashed by a cop's nightstick
Or compressed into "Free Speech Zones,"
Make their pilgrimage to pay homage,
Not only to the five Haymarket Martyrs
Who were innocent of the crimes they died for,
But to all the labor reformers and "communists"
Who've chosen to be buried near the monument.

Emma Goldman,  Lucy Parsons, Ben Rietman,
Joe Hill, Big Bill Heywood, Voltairine de Cleyre...

Sadly the visitors are far too few
To validate August Spies' prophetic words,
Uttered in a muffled voice from beneath
The stifling hood of black canvas
That the hangman had pulled over his head.

   "The time will come when our silence
     will be more powerful than the voices
      you are throttling today."

The silence of this gathering of the dead
Is broken only by the twittering of birds
And the distant hum of freeway traffic
The labor martyrs who were wrongly condemned
For their beliefs rather than their guilt;
Who gave their lives in the struggle
To win us an eight hour day,
More time to spend with our families,
Some respite from a life of wage slavery,

Rest almost forgotten.

Corporate America has the upper hand again.
There will be new martyrs.

"They who do not study history
  Are condemned to repeat it."






                                                                             Rich Hanson

The Mother Tree Trilogy (Three Spoon River Poems)

Rebecca Parsons

My heartsick parents drove their wagon
Into Lewistown to seek a doctor for me;
But it was no use.  I was six months old
When I died of the whooping cough.
Having no money to pay for a proper headstone,
My mother hesitatingly asked the sexton
If she could plant a tree to mark my grave.
The slender sapling took hold.  Eventually
Its roots embraced the rude wooden coffin
That had become my eternal cradle.
My maple whispers to me of the golden sun,
Nurturing rain and rich back soil.
It reassures me when I hear the crack
Of thunder during fierce summer storms.
I can feel my tree stretch toward the sun
As it sprouts its leaves to welcome Spring.
You were so wise, Mother.
How did you know that the tree that you planted
To mark my final resting place
Would become my teacher, protector and friend?

Rachel Parsons

The small sapling that I planted to mark
My daughter's grave was watered
With my tears as I slipped it into the earth.
I tapped the ground around it tenderly,
Pulling it up against the trunk of the little maple
As I would've my daughter's blanket around her.
I prayed that it would take root and grow
To become my baby Rebecca's protector.
Then I had to move on, following my husband
On a trek that had taken us from Buffalo
To this village of now bitter association,
To what we'd dreamed would be a better life
In Texas.  We did prosper,
But I never could conceive another child.
We were wealthy enough at the time of my death
To allow my husband to honor my last wish.
He sent me back here
To be buried near this now majestic red maple,
Close to my daughter.

Betsy Bannister

As the daughter of the sexton
Who'd recorded burials at Oak Hill Cemetery,
I'd heard the story of the young mother,
Never dreaming that it would pertain to me.
Then the gift of the body that I gave in love
Left me with a faithless man's parting gift.
Ashamed of my gullibility, and fearful
Of what my parents would think of me, and how
This town's narrow-minded prudes would react,
I covered my growing shame in loose dresses.
I resented the seed that had been planted in me
Until in the seclusion of a nearby woods
I gave birth to a stillborn little girl.
Sadness overwhelmed me as I gazed down
At her tiny hands, her delicate body, and her face
Wreathed in the innocence of sinless repose.
During those moments I would've given my life
To have given her the opportunity to breathe.
I thought of that other mother of years past
Who always mourned the loss of her daughter
And begged before death to be buried near her.
That evening I slipped out of the house,
Retrieved the sad little bundle that I'd hidden,
And buried her close to the Mother Tree.

I dare not ask to be buried near her.

The Marble Valise

The stillness in Burlington's Aspen Grove,
That solemn sanctuary of remembrance,
Is remniscent of the quiet of a library.
To stretch this simile to a metaphor,
A cemetery is a card catalogue of granite.
Each life's compressed to vital statistics;
A name first, then a publication date,
Then when that tale of life went out of print.
At most, lives are summarized by epitaphs
That read like blurbs on a book's dust jacket.
Pithy statements, like "Loving Husband,"
"Gentle Wife," or "A Christian Gentleman,"
Or a bible verse, or a rhyming couplet;
Grief expressed in conventional fashion.
That's why the bag captures our attention.

A marble valise rests upon a square base,
As though some drummer had just set it down
For a moment, intending to return.
So out of place, this image of business
Amidst this serenity of silent stone.

"You don't sell a product, you sell yourself."

This maxim is drilled into salemen in training.
If a man takes this assertion to heart though,
Each slammed door, curt rebuff and refusal
Becomes a personal rejection.  This young man
Penned this last note before he took his own life.

"My trip has ended.  Send my samples home."

Chiselled on the base beneath the marble valise,
His words of despair, disillusionment and pain
Are there for us to touch like silent scars,
Fossils of anguish forever encased in stone.

At the Gravesite of Theodore Gericault

It comes across as inappropriate,
To me at least; no, not the romantic statue
Of the artist reclining atop his granite stone,
His soulful gaze modestly averted
As he thrusts his brush and palette toward us
As though presenting them as credentials,
As proof of his worthiness to be interred
In Pere Lachise, the cemetery of artists.
After all, this is in Paris, France,
Where an excesssive amount of conceit
Can be both expected and forgiven.

No, it's the bas-relief below the painter
That I object to, his "Raft of the Medusa,"
Reproduced in bronze, now oxidized to green,
As if shyly trying to shed its notoriety,
Drift away, and anchor amidst the lush foliage.

After the French frigate Medusa ran aground,
Close to a hundred fifty souls, those without clout,
Were jammed onto a raft made of masts and planking.
Rank and prestige had piled into the six lifeboats
Which first tried to tow the raft behind them,
But soom cut it loose, that umbilical cord
Of humanity that threatened their own survival.

After fifteen days, the strongest fifteen remained.
Soldiers and officers had been thrown overboard first,
Order and leadership jettisoned like moldy rations
As despair flexed its muscles and vented its anger
Upon the minions of the state that had betrayed them.
The weak and the wounded were next thrown overboard,
As they all had been, but without the pretense of a raft
As a salve for conscience. Maddened by thirst, heat
And hunger, those left finally resorted to cannibalism.

The painting depicts emaciated survivors
Frantically waving to attract a distant ship,
Waves rearing up behind them, hope illuminated
By an eerie storm-breaking light that frames
The raft in storm-bred shades of brown,
Surging seas soil-sodden from the sandbar,
Menacing clouds laden with Saharan dust;
Earthtones reaching out to engulf exhausted men
Poised between the ecstacy of deliverance
And the hopelessness of abandonment.

One wanders a cemetery seeking some solace,
Some life-affirmation amidst the marble tributes.
One looks for hope, some affirmation of God's love,
His mercy, his heaven, and perhaps immortality.
This artist's harrowing depiction of men
As evil and brutish beasts summon dark images
To intrude upon the stark stone finality of death.
Yes, this bas-relief is inappropriate here.