Woden Cemetery
©2001
walking about Woden Cemetery today … the tiny graves of children make me cry … I get lost among unknown names … I am getting to know them … one with the marble slab unaccountably smashed, her name was Anne … these are my father’s new neighbours … Emily Gray, nextdoor, who died on the fourth of June … the day before my birthday, in 1939 … three years after the cemetery was opened … at least she missed World War Two … forgotten, maybe, I have not yet seen flowers on her grave … others have no plaques, just bits of browned concrete in a field… others have nouveau-riche headstones … others have taste … Shirley Glover, Actress …
I am looking for a familiar … well, not face … the dead are faceless … the kite is still in the tree where it stuck at two and the wind blows scentless … there are magpies here that alight on chipped concrete and take off alive … the Crosses and Stars of David and inscriptions in Chinese I cannot read, the flowers, the flowers, the flowers, it is like the Somme dug up with poppies, the native flowers on your grave that outlived you, Dad, the children’s graves, the graves … the army gravely at attention in its war ghetto …
in your coffin you looked so old, so eminent, more awesome than Lenin …
but that is ridiculous … I cannot think of words here in the cemetery … speech is pointless … there are machines which should not be here, diggers and … when you were buried they used a cunning device to let you down into the grave, putting a dozen gravediggers out of work … I think you would have been outraged … you worked on the roads and building sites for years … it once nearly killed you with double pneumonia … you helped to build the Neath steelworks Thatcher closed …
but I am rambling …
as you know, Dad …
and looking for something which doesn’t exist …
walking about Woden Cemetery today … looking for a familiar face … looking, looking, beyond any looking glass … but there are no faces … everyone is below … they never say a word, the dead … in the end there is no word …
only a magpie, noiseless, alighting on chipped concrete to take off alive …
others, living too, move about in silence … I ignore them, as if I am on any city street… where I met the intellectually-disabled woman and looked after her tiny quivering dog Buster while she went to the shop … where I met the angel whose husband died after fifty years … and just off which you taught me why the wind on the roundabout blew when the air was still … and I am forgetting why I am here, here where all is memory, scratched on hard surfaces that can be smashed … I walk on the majority, confined to this little park …
outside, every garden and stone reminds me of a cemetery …
I had never been here before, but knew … that one day I would, and will be here … here, where it all ends …
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