Our Poetry Circle Meets at the Cemetery
Quietest venue in the city, and the residents never heckle.
Our poetry group has been thrown out of three coffee shops, one public library, and, memorably, a juice bar, which is why we now meet on Tuesdays at five in Greenmount Cemetery. Nobody complains. Attendance among the permanent residents is excellent, and in four years, not one of them has heckled.
Let me defend the evictions, briefly. The first coffee shop objected to applause. The second objected to Ruth, seventy-one, retired English teacher, reading a poem about her late husband's hands at a volume she insists is “conversational” and audiologists would classify otherwise. The library was a misunderstanding involving a candle. The juice bar had a policy, apparently, against crying, and Benny had written about his dog, so the crying was general and unstoppable, and the manager stood there holding a mango smoothie like it was a fire extinguisher.
“We need somewhere,” Ash said afterward on the sidewalk, “where nobody can ask us to leave.”
Ruth looked down the street, where the cemetery gates stood open under the maples. “I know a place,” she said, “with very tolerant neighbors.”
So that is how it started... not as a statement about mortality but as a real estate decision.
There are five of us, six if you count Walt, the groundskeeper, who circles past on his golf cart every meeting exactly once, pretending to check the beech tree for disease. Walt claims he does not care for poetry. Walt has also, over four years, slowed the cart to a crawl approximately two hundred times at the precise moment someone starts reading, which is a lot of concern for one beech.
We meet at the bench in section H, under that beech, near a man named Arthur Dunmore, 1911 to 1974, Beloved. Just the one word. Ruth says a stonecutter charged by the letter and the family chose perfectly.
The rules are simple. Everyone brings a poem, yours or someone else's. Everyone reads standing up, because Ruth says poems die sitting down. And nobody apologizes before reading. The fine for saying “this is rough” or “this is stupid, but” is one dollar, cash, into the biscuit tin, and the tin funds our December dinner, and I will just say that some years, thanks entirely to Benny's self-esteem, we have had steak.
When we run dry we work from a list of prompts Ash keeps folded in her coat, and there is something about being handed a prompt like “write about a door you didn't open” while standing among four thousand closed doors that will absolutely produce a poem, whether you want it to or not.
I should say the obvious thing. Yes, it changed how we wrote.
You cannot read a mediocre poem about your feelings to a hillside of headstones.
The audience recalibrates you. Every cheap line sounds cheaper out there, and every true one rings like a struck rail. Ruth calls it “the front row effect.” The front row at Greenmount has heard every possible sentence about love and loss, delivered through actual tears at actual funerals, and your clever little stanza about airports is up against all of that.
For two years it was mostly comedy with good bones.
Then Mrs. Okonkwo arrived, and this is the part of the story I actually need to tell you.
We noticed her the way you notice weather. Every Tuesday, a small woman in a gray wool coat, two rows over in section J, tending a grave with a thoroughness that had nothing left to accomplish. Trimming grass that was already trim. Straightening flowers that stood straight. She kept her back to us, but backs can listen, and hers did. Some Tuesdays, when a poem ended, her hands would go still for a moment... before resuming.
This went on for months. We adjusted without discussing it. Ruth's volume, for once in her life, found a middle setting. Nobody waved. You do not intrude on a person and her grave.
Then in October, after Benny finished a poem about his mother's kitchen, we heard gravel... and she was standing at the end of our bench holding a shoebox with both hands, the way you hold something that outweighs its weight.
“My husband,” she said, “was Samuel Okonkwo. That is him, there.” She did not point. She just moved her chin an inch. “Forty-one years, and I learned when I cleared out his desk that he wrote poems. That box was taped shut inside a suitcase. There are sixty-two of them.” She looked at each of us in turn, finishing on Ruth, correctly identifying the commanding officer. “I cannot read them out loud. I have tried. I get four lines in. But you read here every week, and he is here every week, and I thought...”
She did not finish the sentence. She did not have to.
A poem read aloud in a cemetery is not morbid. It is a letter finally arriving at the correct address.
We read Samuel Okonkwo's poems for six Tuesdays, standing at our bench, facing his stone. Ruth read the formal ones, the sonnets with their shirts tucked in. Ash read the angry ones, and there were angry ones, about his first job in this country and a foreman named Callahan. Benny read one about a dog, obviously. The man had worked as a hospital porter for thirty years and there were poems about the night corridors, the sound of his own keys, the things porters see that doctors are spared.
And there were love poems. Fourteen of them, one woman throughout. In one, he watches her fall asleep during a storm and decides the thunder can have the sky, he has the better half of the arrangement. When Ash read that one, Mrs. Okonkwo laughed, one clear note, and said, “That storm was in 1983... He told me he slept through it.”
She heard her husband's voice say new things, forty years old and brand new, every Tuesday for six weeks.
I have been around poetry my whole adult life and I have never seen it do anything better than that.
With her permission, we posted the storm poem on a community wall for poets, under his full name, so it would exist somewhere a stranger could stumble on it. Strangers did. She reads the comments on Sundays, she told us, after church, twice.
Grief was never the reason we came to Greenmount. We came because a juice bar has a crying policy. But somewhere between Arthur Dunmore's one perfect word and Samuel's shoebox, I stopped pretending our venue was a joke. Most of what we read out there, when it is any good at all, turns out to be about grief wearing one costume or another, and the residents knew that before we did.
Mrs. Okonkwo sits with us now, sixth chair, gray coat. She still does not read aloud. She picks who reads what, which is a form of authorship, and Ruth has conceded the role with the grace of a general surrendering to a better general.
Last Tuesday, as we packed up in the almost-dark, Walt's golf cart came around the beech and stopped, fully stopped, for the first time in four years. He looked at the tree for a while...
“Beech is fine,” Ash said.
“I know,” Walt said, and kept sitting there, and after a minute, in the tone of a man reporting a fact about drainage, added:
“Read the storm one again. I missed the end.”
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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