May you always know, my little one,
                 you were wished for,
                 longed for,
                 prayed for,
                 and wanted.
                                 -Anonymous

Born dead?
              Can it be both?

Cemetery so small
it overflows
with shadows and darkness
from decades ago.

Headstones, broken teeth,
Norway Spruce around the cusp-
were it not for these
the little graveyard
would go unnoticed-
a small, ragged field,
brown remnants
of goldenrod,
a dark ground-cloud
of perpetual dusk.

The service completed,
a line of cars
barely moving,
crawls from the grave
across the
narrow, gravel road
and winds its way out
onto Old Main Street.

The wind lifts
with events so old
one wonders
if they ever
actually happened.

Mourners grieve
for this child
who experienced nothing,
knew no one.

*

Consult the “book of grieving.”
for instructions

on how to lament fittingly
for a tiny person
whose life ended
in nine days.

Family, friends had come
to console
the shattered parents
of this child who never was.

As soon as
the procession
makes a right turn
out of the cemetery
onto Old Main Street
toward their homes,
a man will light a cigarette,
a child will eat a hard candy,
a woman will turn on the radio,
all of them
will leave behind a casket,
no bigger than a hope chest.

Mourners, knowing they will
never return,
are haunted by leaving the infant
alone in the aged boneyard,
surrounded by her own kind
in the custodial blackness.