Smetzer Graves Near Clinton, Kansas

 

This revised poem Copyright © 2010 by Michael Smetzer

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To have lived a decade here

before I found these names:

 

        Edith Smetzer

        Daugh. of D. & E. Smetzer

        Died 1886

        Aged 14 days

 

her infant bones the earliest in the churchyard

 

        John Smetzer

        Died June 18, 1892

        Aged 74 years, 5 months, 15 days

 

at 61 he had been the oldest of the Ohio Smetzers

who traveled west to Kansas

and disappeared.

 

These things I have heard of my great great uncle:

 

        that he was illiterate,

        that he never married,

        that he was a hired man,

        that he was the only man of his family

                never to own land.

 

And I understood that he moved westward

        across the land

like a lateral root

hardly disturbing the leaves.

 

So here you ended, old uncle,

your plot open to the sky,

buried more deeply in your faint depression

        of earth

than ever you plowed.

 

It is evening.

Light blue still marks the western edge,

but the sky above is growing higher, thinning,

falling back through darker blues

to the blackness behind the stars.

 

And you, uncle, are still thinning

        in your darkness,

still dissolving into this place I’ve come to.

The darkness dissolves my family name

and leaves me open to a field of stones.

 

Years from now, my great nephew’s children

        may hear of me

 

        that I never married

        that I worked for wages,

        that I never owned land.

 

And I would like them to understand

that I was an illiterate of the earth,

as transient in my time as John in his,

 

as transient really as Edith there,

who never knew the soil

before it closed her in.

 

(first published in Kansas Quarterly)