The Futility of Gravestones

 

I walked past the Maluhia Cemetery, 

Pondering its aged state, where many gravestones 

Had worn so much that the names of the buried 

     Have faded away. 

All flowers left there had turned to dust decades 

Ago. What remained of these people besides 

What might still be below, bones and teeth, 

     Monuments to death 

Not life? Maluhia signifies solemn peace 

And stillness in Hawaiian. It is now an irony. 

When these graves were interred in the sheltering 

     Kalihi Vallley 

They rested in sacred stillness, but now urban 

Life speeds in its daily pace so we barely notice 

The site where those forgotten souls lie nameless 

     In their unmarked tombs. 

Which is why I will not trust my legacy 

To stones no matter how durable they may be 

But to a life lived in a way that is etched 

     On those I have touched.

His Final Gift

My parents had married three days after Valentine’s Day 

In 1945. Sixty –six years later my mother carried 

Bunches of fresh, bright freesias to my father’s 

    Grave in Oroville. 

He had aspired to be a farmer all his life. In his old age, 

He pulled himself up for a loving act of cultivation 

Sowing a dozen bulbs under the bedroom window 

    Where they both still slept 

Together as they had for most of sixty years. 

Soon, his memory of any of their time withered 

And though he was moved away, the bulbs stayed 

    Lost in Dad’s past dream. 

He had told no one why he planted them there. Mom 

Had forgotten about them as they lay dormant 

In Natomas’ black soil even as his own memory 

    Quietly slipped away 

With no trace of colors. The freesias waited for light, 

Then exactly one year after my father died, not a few 

Robust pioneers burst through the Natomas' crust sharing

    Love's persistence.

Fool's Love

 

He murmured to her that her hands were perfect. 

Recoiling, she rejected him as a fool on that subject 

Didn’t he see how short and ragged her nails were? 

So brittle, they wouldn’t grow long like the pearls 

That decorated the fingers of those women 

On television, plus her thumbs were stumps. 

Besides, her hair was too dry and her legs too fat. 

No man who ignored all of those many faults 

Was anything but foolish, so she married another 

Whom she thought she loved even though he never 

Praised any part of her and now as while lingering 

Over her dishwater she gazed at her aging fingers 

Now wrinkled, and reflected on the old suitor: 

What would it have been like to love a fool?