A Place Familiar, Foreign.

November Graveyard

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees
Hoard last year’s leaves. won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn
To elegiac dryads, and dour grass
Guards the heart-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones
Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saints tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare,
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

Sylvia Plath, 1956