Suburban Cemetery
       

Scenic Cemetery on Scenic Avenue, is where
The Mexicans who die now
Neighbor the sons and daughters
Of Gold Rush pioneers.
Forever they keep company
With the timeless silence of stone angel statues,
The marble madonnas with devotional blank stares,
Their otherworldly, uninterrupted vigils,
In tended acres of green-lawned grasses
And sad flowers,
Fresh with the commemoration of loss.

Across Scenic Avenue, facing the cemetery
The public psychiatric ward
Safeguards nightmares and screams.

I imagine the mad steal furtive looks at the cemetery
From the latticed windows that hide them
To see hovering over the headstones
The wings of angels at rest after flight
Their untarnished beauty-queen faces
Poised above tombstones whose worn whiteness
Reminds the confined
Of life on the outside, it's bright pleasures
Its intoxications, the collapse it leads to
Because exuberance is betrayal.

Angelic haze of January sunshine.
Scenic Cemetery is a garden where peace
Blooms and sorrow is tranquilized forever.
I see, from a distance, fragments of anonymous angels
The graceful poses of sun-bleached madonnas
Who wouldn't exist without the dead
Who were not made to pray
For the insane, for the living.

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Copyright © 2020 Ramón García All rights reserved
from The Bitter Oleander
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission