GRAVEYARDS

Arlington is no longer.
Its perfect rows of whitewashed markers
blown a thousand miles away,
all plowed up in furrowed ground,
an awesome, massive rending.
Fertile ragged soil,
unkempt and wild,
lies in heaped haphazard piles.
Gettysburg is the same,
the ancient battlefield
newly scarred and ripped,
torn and twisted,
as if a thousand cannon balls
had lashed the earth again.
In Orleans town
ancient sacred mausoleums
crack and crumble,
lie crushed in awful ruin
as in Katrina's days.
In Tombstone's sunlit desert
Boot Hill is blown apart.
Cowboys laid there,
boots turned up,
their epitaphs now gone,
forgotten words found tangled
in ravaged thorny weeds.
Across the roiling seas,
the greens of Normandy
feel once again the gash of war,
rocks and boulders tossed about,
flowered fields quick overturned.
All has gone amuck.
In lands beyond the sun,
Khmer's killing fields
are carved asunder
and further still
Rwandan ditches
open wide to brighting sun.
Green Acres no longer green!
My father's grave open wide!
On that great day we all will know:
it's not just One
who rises up!