Speak of Her over my Grave,

Watch How She Brings me Back to Life

A preserved human heart in a leaden case, discovered in the medieval crypt of a church in Cork, Ireland and collected by General Pitt Rivers in the 1860s.

“Once we were lowering a body when the side of the grave collapsed and we all fell in. The mourners were superstitious, and swore the grave was bewitched. But in all my life of grave digging I shall never forget an incident that happened 10 years ago. The hearse and carriages had just arrived. They were up on that hill yonder. The pallbearers prepared to take the coffin from the hearse. As one of the younger men put his hand on the rail of the casket to draw it out he fell dead. We took him away, held the services, and buried the pallbearer the following Sunday.”

Poet at Greenwood Cemetery, 2021

mattock

Flower petals cause blood-like stains on the grave of opera singer Jane Margyl in Batignolles cemetery in Paris.

A bronze coffin used to transport President Kennedy's body from Dallas to Washington was dropped from a military plane into the ocean two years after he was killed, according to assassination documents. “Apparently the casket is in 9,000 feet of water in the Atlantic Ocean."

The Grave-Digger
By Kahlil Gibran

Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me, “Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like.”

Said I, “You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?”

“Because,” said he, “They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”

Josephine Smith, age 84, digging a grave at
Drouin Cemetery, Victoria, c. 1944

Alas, Poor Yorick!

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

From "Digging"
by
Seamus
Heaney

Jorie Graham,
San Sepolcro

Mahmoud Darwish