A Neighborhood in Chicago
    from a line of Gwendolyn Brooks

    In its last halogen hours,
    the evening forgives the alley-
    ways ... wherein,

    Every June morning, again,
    here are new leaves, viridian.
    They'll come to,

    Tremble toward the brightening.
    Instruments without musicians,
    they will play

    A silence, soothing last night's
    bruised pianos and exhausted
    horns. For your

    instruction, each meager leaf,
    shaped like, more intricate than, a
    violin,

    accompanies rats and moths
    into the dawn, and a cougar,
    hiding, with

    wounded eye, a torn paw: in
    halogen night, no escape — but
    there's luck, grace.


    Memorial Day
    after Walt Whitman

    A last formality is
    running late, as a life can't,
    this hot day. The final
    ethereal glow of
    the sun seems to come up from
    underfoot in this parkland
    of polysyllabic death.

    These deep graves, two this time,
    neatly cut into the earth,
    await the arrivals,
    and two adjacent heaps of
    damp fertile glebe are half
    blanketed by reticent
    dark tarpaulins. After
    the full moon's first moments of
    horizon-magnified
    fact and risen largesse, it
    has contracted as our
    heaven has passed it by and now
    it floats above the crowns
    of the inky trees and
    well beyond bare roofs. It has
    always been an entity
    born dead — not a phantom, as
    must be this son, a muddy
    part of whom soared from cratered
    waste lands far away before
    landing here, and also
    this veteran father,
    whose heart staggered into
    an ER and failed after
    he heard what circumstance
    had done to his one boy.

    No horses — hearses, the first
    two cars. A corps of six men —
    they bear the heavy coffined
    corpse of the father toward his
    very small opening in
    the planet; and six more
    envoys of duty, with
    much-practiced attentiveness,
    slow-step the light son, an
    imperfect cadaver with
    handles, to his own last place.
    White gloves lift up the draped
    famed cloth, super-striped and
    starry, from the younger
    casket, fold it just so —
    hands with hands over hands
    in ritual honor,
    a ceremony neither
    of mystical creed nor
    of doubter's midnights — then
    they advance it to the one
    who remains. She's looking
    away from her burials,
    down at the blades of moon grass.
    She feels no great gut blows
    from startled convulsive
    big drums that shake the spirits
    of mourners, nor any
    whirring of equally
    perilous small drums that
    might reduce the silence.
    The son is submitted as
    lifeless organism to
    dirt; the father's remains
    descend into his pit
    alongside, likewise on
    tightly held ropes men slowly
    let slip. (In foremost ranks of
    a final unbecoming
    these two fell alike.) The
    ropes snake back up into
    what's left of natural light —
    remainder of the ancient
    calculus of day and night.
    From a boom box ten paces
    away, the familiar
    bugled notes say that the
    journey of these remains
    is done. Even if no grief
    shadows the bugler, bugles
    do sound it, word it — that
    unacceptable sentence
    of slow notes.
      Distant, on
    overtime, respectful, yet
    much too near, a stranger
    waits to start up a backhoe.
    On such occasions, after
    courage of soldiers or
    folly of command or cold
    wrong purposes among
    patriarchs, lords, kings, and freed
    madness in red valleys,
    mountains, cities, villages,
    in schools, shrines, sheds, beds, mud-brick
    hearts, we have offered up our
    mortally wounded, un-
    comprehending remembrance.
    We look down or away
    and notice the impassive
    grass under our bloody weight.


    Belief

    The lovely Director who
    led us with her feathered hands
    as she mouthed

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