Alex Missall

Morning in Graveyard


In this town the fields are dead,
cut to stumps,
filled with wilted shells of over-turned roots.


In this town, all are buried in the same place—
in the cemetery
next to the Victorian, red-brick home.


Cut into the earth are
miles and miles of tombstones.


Sealing the empty spaces: morning fog
that slips between graves,
that hangs onto the soil.


A white sun rises,
and turns the dissipating fog translucent.
Dew sits on blades of grass,
and the cemetery-caretaker walks a stone path
toward untouched, forsaken land.