they buried the unclaimed nameless in a field
north of the city & the city grew around it
now a fence amidst commerce, a square,
no monuments mark those below the grasses.
it could be a park if they ever thought to unlock the gate
the unclaimed came from the hospital back
when the hospital was called an asylum
what else changed with our language?
what’s come from all our progress. all our progression
from animal into angel into engine?
what of all our invasive photographs of the brain?
there are potters fields everywhere & the bodies stay
until flood or famine or gentrification
maybe in death all our madness leaches
with our plastics into the soil; maybe the worms
do the worm in the earth
each grave is the ground sobbing open:
someone might put in a poem
but for their burials surely the ritual was stripped
of its pomp & pageantry
no widow left to mourn
& if there was she did it long ago
perhaps a few words in latin then the earth shoveled back
into the earth
today i watched a man cut the lawn even as a bed sheet
from atop his high powered machine
all blades of grass are headstones
they grow despite us.