I can’t visit my graves in Indiana so I go with her.

She can’t find the right road off Omaha St.---

a cemetery with so many entrances---

one for one kind of Lutherans, many

for another kind, their headstones

facing the other direction,

way back behind all those Lutherans,

the fenced Jewish cemetery,

where I once found a Jewish Mason;



after three tries we finally take the road

with the brick gate posts; there are the stones

we seek: mother, father, pediments

overgrown, husband, on the next lot,

a small weathered cross on a cord

hanging from the strut of one

of the big potholders, with the pots

we fill with flowers; lying at the base,

a new dog tag on a chain saying:

“They’re all heroes.” “It’s my Willy,”

she says. “He’d do a thing like that,”

her other grandson having gone to war,

now in the Green Zone. 



I’ve only brought a big spoon,

but I manage to dredge the grass

off her parent’s pediment,

scrape the other, so they look cared for--

which is all we want

for our beloved dead---

no matter how far away.

Peg Carlson Lauber, a longtime EC resident, has published poetry since 1963 and taught in colleges for 40 years. Her latest books are New Orleans Suite and The Whooping Crane Chronicles.