2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

All Hallows,
Colma Cemetary
by Jeanne Lohmann
A friendly necropolis, communities united in civilized fashion:
fraternal orders, sailors and Wobblies, Italians and Jews,
generations of Chinese. Photographs of the dead,
looking more or less as they looked in life,
stand against granite and marble. From years
of snapshots, survivors chose these particular faces.
Markers are set flat to the ground for easy mowing,
vases filled with flowers that last all year..
Statistics say we die almost as fast as the newborn come.
and since we don’t want decay contaminating the local
water supply, we seal our caskets for the mutual comfort
of living and dead. We scatter their ashes coarse and gray
as oatmeal, with unexpected fragments of bone.
We bury them under a favorite tree in the garden,
or hire a boat, take the remains to the Bay,
backpack them into wilderness. Propitiating our guilt
for lives that go on without them, we invite the dead
to join us for holidays, graveyard picnics.
We leave offerings for them on the grass,
flowers, small bowls of grain.
Each year with the dead in retreat, it’s harder
to remember them as they were, though we’d like them
to come when we call, and we go on saying their names.
We hope they’ll keep in touch, though touch is nothing
the dead are famous for. Invading our dreams, they
surprise us. They wait in the schoolyard, ambush us
on the stair, at the office and altar, the shop.
When we travel, they follow the wake of the ship,
8 Santa Fe Literary Review