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.