Marianne Szlyk - Walking Past Mt. Calvary in Summer / At Bonaventure Cemetery

Walking Past Mt. Calvary in Summer

The old women with finger curls and clip-on earrings,

with cherries pinned to their straw hats,

the old men with work-gnarled hands

have become

ink-black trees

looming over headstones.

These few trees totter in no wind.

Tonight with open windows,

in the humming darkness,

we will hear them fall.

Resting in the Light by Mary Judkins

At Bonaventure Cemetery

-- after an image by Mary Judkins

At home in the world,

Spanish moss flows like sunlight

from the trees whose roots

are in fertile ground.

Sunlight hovers on the left

like the white light of myth, 

movies, and musicals.

Today the ancestors walk among us, 

recognizing the children in the adults,

laughing at the fashion 

and gadgets we cherish.

Not at home in the world,

the mourning madonna hugs the cross,

but she is streaked with green.

Even the shadow striping her gown

is the color of soil, the red bricks 

of the city beyond.  Her tears

are moss, not the bitter crystal

that etches stained glass

and indoor stone.

The ancestors tiptoe around her,

but they mingle with us

in and out of sunlight,

in and out of shadow.

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College and the editor of The Song Is...  Recently, she published her first chapbook, Listening to Electric Cambodia, Looking at Trees of Heaven, with Kind of a Hurricane Press: http://barometricpressures.blogspot.com/2014/10/listening-to-electric-cambodia-looking.html  Her poems have appeared in a variety of online and print venues, including ken*again, Of/with, and bird's thumb.