KILCUMMIN CEMETERY
.
Of course it’s raining when I push the gate
that doesn’t want to yield on this rood of grey:
stone markers, stone wall, a leaden sky, graves
that were maybe neat one time and prayed at
but, decades on from the last burial, have lost
whatever certainty they had to slump and moss.
Headstones’ mildewed names, exhausted dates
commemorate now one thing: how to forget.
.
Someone in my line is buried somewhere here.
Her legacy: three entries in a parish register
and a scattered bloodline, scattering her name.
Anne Walsh. My mother’s great-grandmother.
Gone. I pull the gates behind, free as ever I was
to find in an unfound past a tether, an excuse.