On an October afternoon I wandered through the Copps Hill Cemetery
One of the oldest in Boston.
HP Lovecraft wrote a story
About tunnels running
Underneath the graves To a hellish world.
Pickman’s Model
“There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers—and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old times!”
The horror.
None of a sunny autumn afternoon.
I looked for my family Brewsters Howells and Hamblins.
On the black flat tombstones
I knew none of them
But recognized the names Of the dead from three hundred years ago.
Dead for centuries
But still alive in eternity.
As we get old We forget As we get older We are forgotten
Except by the gravestones
Until the wind erases away the names.