Graveyard Hierarchy

My son asked how much a tombstone costs
as we trace ancestry through the graveyard
and calculate dates—how common it was to bury babies.
 
Some lucky souls merit saintly companions
who guard their tombs with outstretched arms
or a wrought iron fence to ward off vagrants.
But look how the monied died just as young.
 

At the rear of the yard are the stones we can’t read—

all the names swallowed up by the cold.

Bare of epitaph, they lean against each other,

even their stones are tired.

 

Then there are the markers that only bear a number,

like the tattooed at Auschwitz.

One straggler is off alone and we wonder

if he wanted it so.

The rounded stone juts white from Earth like a tooth.

And what of those who couldn’t even get inside the fence—

separated from the gilded, even here.

To celebrate Swedish Nobel Laureate Tomas Transtromer, dVerse's Bjorn Rudberg asked us to write a poem of exactly 144 words, including a line taken from one of the Nobel writer's poems. In case you can't guess, it's all the names swallowed up by the cold.

More at dVerse on this renowned poet and how he captured the long winters of Scandinavia in his writing.

Note: All the photographs herein on my own. No peeping AI on my shoulder with his shudder eye.