Evergreen Cemetery
After a day of driving, I’m tired.
I turn off at a small cemetery
with Evergreen scrolled
on a wrought iron arch.
It’s peaceful here
with no dead I know
and no one weeping.
I count as many statues
of dogs as granite angels.
The lambs are for babies
including Carl Peter, two days old.
Here’s a bouquet of new jonquils
left for Alma who died so long ago
rain eroded her last name.
North on unmarked mounds
wild ginger and native violets
grow above Native bones.
Most of the headstones
in Evergreen are already turned
toward the setting sun.
At the horizon a choir of clouds
wears robes of twilight blue.
Elsewhere in South Dakota
stands a house with its porch light on,
the first star I’ll see tonight.
© Margaret Hasse
Between Us, Nodin Press, 2016
That Summer Abroad, Joanne
Have we ever been so free as then?
We’d change destinations
on a whim, Rome one day,
hitchhiking to Brindisi the next.
The cheap berth on a ferry to Greece
meant sleeping on the deck by Italian boys.
Remember their garlicky breath?
I want to call you up right now,
buy one-way tickets to Athens
where we’ll board the boat
to the island of Skyros.
We can take turns going to the bakery
for warm bread at dawn,
wearing cotton shifts
we slept in like virgins.
The sun runs its hands up the hillside
to each white house.
© Margaret Hasse
Between Us, Nodin Press, 2016
Poems from Between Us by Margaret Hasse
