Three Poems – Lauren Gilmore

NOT ANOTHER GRIEF POEM

Our dead do not sleep sound. 
Like candles melting in the middle of the day
or garden hoses left running in the rain. 
              I haven’t visited a grave in months,
so the holes have started coming to me.
 
To grieve is to spend years leveling 
a ditch, with shovels full of nothing. 
We keep digging, because we must,
 
when every song of redemption seems
to echo through the same hollow chords, 
we dig; when decorations in cemeteries 
start making the headstones look bigger,

we dig, because our initials may be carved
into granite before we learn to trust the bark
of a tree to keep them bonded to a lovers’.