Across the plains the two ancient voices twined,
“O bury me not. . .”
The tot in the back seat stared out the window
into the the black star-scarred night,
Dripping its wholly sunktitude down
across the oblivious landscape
So soft aglow in some half-mooned,
half-life tableau.
The dim whir of the rubber meetin’ the road,
the weird blue-green glow of the dashboard.
The musty odor of some ancient thing,
once so virile, now so low hung
You know, death’s sure harvest and all that.
The little guy feels – not thinks,
no, not thinks, not yet thinks,
How odd this strange duet somehow vaguely portends
his own crossing
Of a vast frontier sensed, only sensed,
not imagined in any way, shape or form;
He is not at all, at that point – is only absorbing
these things, not reflecting at all.
So, yes, it strikes him oddly, but only as so many
other things strike him daily as odd,
Simply because they have never been encountered
heretofore.
Yet this strange-away seems also familiar,
as if somehow this has played out before,
Not by him, for sure, for sure. But for the elders?
Well, who knows, who knows?
Somewhere, sometime, how many lost longings
stretched across the eons
Must have such similar souls have pined
to be not boxed in such lonely clime?
Yet, all this is their due, whether in green mulched
lawns or under an alkali flat. . .
The end is just as done and gone.
Now, the singers lie not so very far apart,
glad to say, not on a lonesome prairie,
But still on a sad bare piece of land, eerie, desolate,
but not far from the old hearth and home.
If they could rise, drive and sing again, oh, how
their voices would join in croaking treble,
“Bury me not, bury me not. . .”
poetastrophy 