Jewish Cemetery Queens, New York,1953 Poem by Bernard Henrie

The Jewish cemetery is crowded with markers
and visitors sometime stumble over the graves,
the messages once so clear, now calligraphy
I cannot understand though I wipe my glasses.

Among the tatters and unevenly cut grass
I speak to mother and father, it pleases me
to imagine they hear my voice from the bench
where i sit on ramshackle boards with no back.

For burial, father selected his ceremonial jacket,
the raven black coat we saw only at Yom Kippur,
Passover Seder and in wedding pictures. Other times
he wore a white shirt with open collar, the manager
at Murdochi’s Hebrew Books all his life. Quoting
from memory favorite passages of philosophy,
marked books, stacked until tumbling, a signal
of his pacing and pausing through the house.

My mother, finished with the potatoes, or Hadassah,
read the Tahra to understand her own death ritual,
pouring the Nine, Kaddish, ’El Mal’ei Rahamim,
fiercely questioning the Rabbi and bringing books
forgotten by father as you might forget a coffee cup.

Her small face lightly sprinkled with shadow, swaddled
in towels and painted the color of Fall leaves.

Paid sitters on folding chairs during her lying out
so that she would not be alone in the first dozen
hours of death.