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Graven Images
by Lydia Wick
 

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art by Jason Beam

This page is dedicated to my not-so-secret love affair with cemeteries. In my girlhood days, my grandmother and I used to have picnics in the cemetery. As an adult, I go there to escape the noise. I walk, I meditate, I bask. Sometimes I bring along my camera and take pictures.
 
Most people cannot appreciate a cemetery's enchantment. They cannot get past the dead bodies. I go not to converse with the dead so much as to breathe in the life -- the earth worms and the trees caroling with birds. The cemetery is as much about joy as it is about sorrow. It is about the beauty of the architecture, and the statues with their faces carved in everlasting expressions of tenderness-- the kind of tenderness you do not see in faces on a city street. It is about serenity and solitude and stillness--about being so quiet within yourself that you can hear the sound of your own blood flowing through your veins.
 
I believe that one must have a sound mind to frequent cemeteries. You have to be comfortable with your own mortality. At any rate, the subject has spawned many delightful urban legends and ghost stories, as well as a few writings of my own. Some of my poems were inspired after visiting cemeteries in New Orleans, Louisiana and Charleston, South Carolina, and even Arlington National Cemetery. I call this collection "Graven Images."

Resurrection
 
Greenwood turns a brittle brown.
Sundown seeps through cracks of pine.
Gnarled fingers scratch a ceiling tomb.
Twilight's womb.  I am reborn.
 
-Lydia Wick

 
 
The Marble Orchard
 
At the end of the day
when ghost shadows play
and darkness bleeds,
she goes to a place called
The Marble Orchard.
 
Down stony paths she shuffles,
her heavy skirts rustling,
following the scent of magnolia
through swaying beards of moss
until...
 
she enters the mausoleum
where ivory angels greet her,
and marbled Christs
look down from their crosses
with frozen expressions of agony;
 
monuments within monuments
sanitized, stainless, no dirt,
no worms to eat the flesh,
no wooden stakes or silver bullets
to drive the spirits,
 
where the world is alabaster white
but for a few blood-red rose petals
sprinkled on the floor like an offering
to the name-gods etched in walls,
 
and the only sounds she hears
are church bells chiming the Angelus,
the fading clang of a streetcar passing,
and her crossless rosary,
the beads rattling nervously
between her fingers.
 
-Lydia Wick

 
 
October's Eye
 
Let me curve along the weeds
and the bones of the gardens,
along the brittle skirts of sun-spattered
paths leading to autumn.
 
Let me wind through woods
with a shock of amber in the trees
. . .
 
Let me creak across a shaky bridge
to hollows where the watchers live,
and blackbirds in flight wrap
the sky in a widow's black shawl
. . .
 
Spring call gently once again,
but do not call me back too soon
from rising winds and raining leaves,
from witchy trails where blackbirds spy,
from passing through October's eye.
 
-Lydia Wick

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Jason Beam

Resurrection Mary

She's the talk of the party,
the belle of the ball
in the Willowbrook Ballroom
At O. Henry Hall

She glides 'cross the floor
with the wisp of a cloud,
her formal gown flowing,
white as a shroud.
 
Christened Mary, just Mary
without a last name
and address unknown
near Old Cemetery Lane.

Icy, aloof... she is aptly described
by the few partners chosen
to dance at her side.
. . .
 
When the clock strikes twelve
and the orchestra dies,
a spellbound admirer
with stars in his eyes

will drive the girl home
in the wee hour mist,
hoping that Mary
will grant him a kiss.
 
But, then, as her driver
approaches the graveyard,
Mary begs him to stop the car.

She slips out the door
without heed of her date
and moves through the fog
toward the locked iron gates
where she vanishes quietly
into the cemetery...
 
Just another Saturday night
For Resurrection Mary.
 
-Lydia Wick

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The Raven Revisited

All written material on this site is the copyrighted property of İLydia Wick 2002-2003 OR LISA LINDSEY All rights reserved. And may not be reprinted without permission.