Walking Our Dead by G. E. Schwartz

..."walking the dead..." --David Bowie

 Something's upended deep in the skies
cloudless but misted as minds so asleep
 but there's buzzing in the cemetery
each tombstone an opening hive opened
 by all our impatient dead--we once thought
they were a storehouse of our immortality
 in the soft, smooth murmur black bees create.
Below us so far away, the road to the dead city.
 We pour some cognac on each tomb, each grave.
The bees drink with us, the dead groan approval.
 But that was months ago and we have returned
in our burnt and dusty bunker, and all the hot 
 noon silences we still hear the bees, tasting 
the liquor's syrup, regarding the smiles below.
 In the tall, dry grasses we found a necklace.
A child's necklace. And we know that when we
 want to be alone with you in the silence, alone
with your tender memory, we will look to that
 cemetery, fingering like some rosary, the beads
      of that necklace.

G. E. Schwartz, born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, 1958, is the author of Only Others Are: Poems (Legible Press), WORLD (Furniture Press), and SPEAKING IN TONGUES (Hank's Loose Gravel Press). He is a simple bell-ringer.