A cemetery seems to be a rather grim place and sad prompt, but I find cemeteries preferable to hospitals. I certainly don't spend very much time visiting cemeteries these days but as a youth I made pilgrimages to several poets grave sites in my New Jersey. I visited Stephen Crane buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, Allen Ginsberg at B'Nai Israel Cemetery in Newark, Walt Whitman at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden and William Carlos Williams buried at Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst,
What did I expect to find besides a headstone and grass or flowers? I'm not sure. Perhaps a ghostly presence? Some inspiration? There were no supernatural presences, but I did write about the visits.
I looking for poems for this call for submissions and found many poems about cemeteries. The poet Billy Collins said, "Oh, you're majoring in English? So then you're majoring in death." There is some truth in that humorous line, but the range of approaches to the subject by poets is wide. Not all poems about cemeteries are about death.
In "The Mountain Cemetery" by Edgar Bowers, we find this description:
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones...
"Oak Grove Cemetery" by Don Thompson, opens with a bit of hope.
Just enough rain an hour ago
to give the wispy dry grass some hope,
turning it green instantly.
In Key West, the living surround the dead,
who are the best neighbors
silent and agreeable as well-swept porches...
writes Jacqueline Allen
Trimble in "Walking Beside the Cemetery, Olivia Street, Key West"
Madeline Tiger
While assembling this prompt, I received word that a poet friend, Madeline Tiger, had died in December. Madeline was the first Dodge Foundation poet I had as an instructor for their poetry workshops for teachers back in the 1980s. She was a gentle soul and a knowledgeable poet and we stayed in touch for decades when she lived nearby in New Jersey. I lost touch with her in this century as she had moved away, but I continued to read her poetry.
A friend posted her poem, "The Mockingbird in May" from her book, The Atheist's Prayer, online with a notice about her passing and so I felt the universe was telling me to use it this month. Jim Haba, who started the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Program and created its biannual poetry festival (and who was my first literature professor at Rutgers) often said that reading a poet's work is a way we keep them alive.
Madi's poem made me think of "At a Jewish Cemetery in Pittsburgh" by Peter Oresick.
...I set down my son
and he crawls in the dimness,
pulling himself up on the headstone.
How delicately he fingers the marble.
Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes.
I’m thinking: grass, stone, quiet–
then babbling from another world.
Another poet, Thomas Lux, taught that what you see in your mind when you hear a word like "cemetery" is not what anyone else sees. We all have personal associations with words based on our experiences and knowledge.
What images does "cemetery" create in your mind? Negative, positive, sad, peaceful, nostalgic, or angry images? Is it a place of death or a peaceful, quiet, green parkland?
In general, people don't visit cemeteries as much as they did a century ago. Being buried in the ground isn't even as common as it once had been. "Tree Cemetery" by Wu Sheng is a poem that addresses alternatives.
Plant a tree in place of a grave
Plant a patch of trees in place of a cemetery
Put a flowerbed around each tree
Lay the ashes of the deceased to rest by the stump
For our March issue, we ask you to write a poem inspired by the word cemetery. Your poem does not have to be set in that location, but it might be a real place that is now only a memory.
Here is Madeline's poem:
The Mockingbird in May
A mockingbird sings near my son's grave
He is out of sight, one of many in the great oak trees,
but the song is intensely clear,
coming through the wind and the leaves.
The evening empties. Nothing here
but rustle and song and gusty breeze.
Unseasonably cold after the hard
rain, Sunday ends with bright sky
to the east, over there where
a woodpecker rattles an undertow.
Another echoes it higher,
louder against a dark tree.
All I know are the sparrows,
the dove call, the mocking,
the low staccato roll, the caw of crows--
the descent, the pebbles placed in a
row on the tombstone to represent
the mourner who came
and those others who didn't come.
I like the way the poet has used birds throughout the poem to signal shifts - the mockingbird, unseen, that is only known by its song, the woodpecker heard as an undertow and echo, and the others in the trees, until our gaze lands on the grave.
Madeline Tiger was born in New York City in 1934. Her family moved to Hewlett,NY on Long Island when she was 3 and then moved again to South Orange, New Jersey where she graduated from Columbia High School.
She graduated from Wellesley College, and received the Master of Arts in Teaching English from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1957. That summer, she began doctoral studies at Columbia University, but stopped when she began teaching high school English in the fall.
Madeline was the mother of five children. Her son Homer died in 1989, when he was 22, in a kayak accident in New Zealand.
"The Mockingbird in May" is from her book, The Atheist's Prayer. Her Birds of Sorrow and Joy: New and Selected Poems was published in 2003.
Madeline died on December 6, 2024 just weeks after her 90th birthday.
Submission deadline: February 28, 2025
Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org
