A Sunday Poem

Every now and then the Redhead says "Get in there and write me a poem."

I don't post my poems very often. I believe most people today would just as soon go to the dentist as read a poem, especially one of mine.

But since you are here already, you might as well read this one.

To the Children in the Trees

Small graveyards are scattered across the Alabama countryside,
Many no bigger than a backyard tomato patch.
Some are perpetually tended beside old wooden churches on lonesome county roads.
Others lie forgotten in the woods.
The passage of time and the resilient southern forest has almost erased this link
to our past.
In places where loblolly and red oak now stand.
a heart-pine clapboard house once stood.
Surrounded by a few sweat-cleared acres,
Proud people once tried to will a living out of rocky red clay,
Unwanted hill country too poor for cotton or much anything else.

A graveyard tells a story if you have time to listen.
Granite or marble markers faded by Nature's relentlessness.
Some of the prosperous have proper monuments.
Po' whites and blacks made do with simple slabs of field stone,
Anonymous as the lives sweated away in the Alabama sun.
First glance reveals nothing, but attention whispers a story.
This place is full of the graves of children.
Here is Annie, age six, died on June 5, 1876.
Here is little brother Jim, died on June 7, 1876.
And close by Sarah, infant, dead a few days later.
There are others over there, different last names, in singles and pairs,
all dead within a few days or weeks of one another.

Something Evil once stopped here.
The awful desperation of the fever,
and children who simply got hot and died.
Anguished mothers who stood by with damp dish cloths and prayed to the Almighty
that the Death Angel might pass over as he did in the Book.
Men with brows as furrowed as the worn out ground worked on,
mumbling the Psalms and cussing their mules in the Valley of the Shadow.

They buried their dead namesakes here and moved on,
searching for a place the fever might not find.
Some new ground with no neighbors to spread the plague
And steal the next generation.

And you thought it was going to be some kind of sappy love poem, didn't you?