963. BY THE TIME I GET THROUGH WAITING

BY THE TIME I GET THROUGH
WAITING, I'LL HAVE GOTTEN
THROUGH THE WAIT
And it's really most unlikely anyway :
you and I, together, waltzing through
that seaside graveyard looking for
Revolutionary War soldiers, buried
there from the Battle of Monmouth.
We're holding drinks and a sandwich
in our hands. Eating amidst the rubble
of Death is disconcerting, to say the least.
I remembered something from Wordsworth
or Longfellow, or one of those old tyrants
who took pen to paper and memorialized
stuff like this. How no one dies in vain but
for the memory of lost love, or mother, or
the land so dear. How the natives, like
Hiawatha bereaved, still clamor for vision
through the woods and the trees, The silence,
I remarked, is deafening. The sunlight shakes
through the Heavens like holy water leaking sacred
from some Papist pail. There's nothing past elation
to keep the mind at bay. I watch a nearby limb as
it slowly leaks its sap - torn from the bark, but
still connected, it yet hangs. Everyone else, save us,
is dead; the tree limb, by contrast, exists now
somewhere between these two quite different states.
I accede to the demand, and decide to live on.
The Revolutionary War is over and, ever at
rest, all these soldiers are calm.