It was snowing on the monuments
My dead father’s name next to my living mothers

You went further back into the cemetery
There where so many lies remain lost to winter

There with the named and the nameless
It was snowing on the monuments

All horizons packed with cloud cover
bodies
Some of us left in the vehicles
We came in

Some became some final gesture
Of departure’s sun borne reflect
behind auto glass
heat blowing feeling back into a face

It was snowing on the monuments
Even in the warmth of an engine turning over
You must forget how we came to this place
How we leave

A procession of memory
an immersion in going away
music

Voices of older songs already
In the broken gone
As some wheel turns us back
Onto a gray road

Copyright © 2020 by Gordon Henry. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 26, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

I am weary of the working,

   Weary of the long day’s heat;

To thy comfortable bosom,

   Wilt thou take me, spirit sweet?

Weary of the long, blind struggle

   For a pathway bright and high,—

Weary of the dimly dying

  Hopes that never quite all die.

Weary searching a bad cipher

   For a good that must be meant;

Discontent with being weary,—

   Weary with my discontent.

I am weary of the trusting

   Where my trusts but torments prove;

Wilt thou keep faith with me? wilt thou

   Be my true and tender love?

I am weary drifting, driving

   Like a helmless bark at sea;

Kindly, comfortable spirit,

   Wilt thou give thyself to me?

Give thy birds to sing me sonnets?

   Give thy winds my cheeks to kiss?

And thy mossy rocks to stand for

   The memorials of our bliss?

I in reverence will hold thee,

   Never vexed with jealous ills,

Though thy wild and wimpling waters

   Wind about a thousand hills.

From The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896) by Alice Cary. This poem is in the public domain.