Produced by Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is by Thomas Moore of Belfast. The poem is from his collection “The Bolt Cutters,” published by Hemlock Press.
Maine Burial Plot
By Thomas Moore
Granite posts square a God’s acre, a tiny
Plot of blueberries and asters beside a crushed-
Stone drive to three new houses on the shore.
The black slate headstones vanished a few years
Back, pretty pieces for a garden in New York
or maybe it was kids one night in a pick-up
Drinking Bud Light who tipped them out, then
Regretted what they’d done and dropped the stones
Into a gully. Somebody knows. The names
Are erased except on a tax roll or a family tree —
Hardscrabble farmers working thin soil over
Ledge, the husband cutting shingles at a mill
Or wrestling granite or shaping white oak
Futtocks for a schooner in Castine. The new
Driveway skirts a rough-cut granite cellar
Hole grown up in popple, the apple trees gone
Wild, the only sounds a clunking hoe, the gulls,
The wind, a washboard’s splash and thrum.
Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu
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