Bonaventure Cematery is a famous burial place in Savannah that played a big role in the novel "Midnight In The Garden Of Good and Evil."

Bonaventure

I walk across the pale gray
stones, a chilled wind blows
like raindrops that sting
against my flushed cheeks
leaving me numbed as
I search for my family whose
bones dried and brittle lie here
beneath the hard black earth.

My fingers stroke the cold stone
as I might have touched
the round Russian face
of my adored grandmother.

I hear a death rattle
cloaked in sorrow searching
for the etched stone marking

Eva Richman
beloved wife mother grandmother

"Mama," a thin pale voice cries rising
from the bottom of my belly.

My grandfather lies next to her.
Even in death, so many years later
I still tremble at his tyranny.
His red curly hair like wire
above his broad beamed face.

Like two children my parents
rest between Mama and Papa.
I fall into the shadows of
forgotten things and stumble
two steps back and come face
to face with my mother's stone.

I smell the warmth of her kitchen
and lick the dough from chocolate
cupcakes as she lines the muffin
tins with waxed paper.
Daddy at her right shrouded
in a damp sheet, I wonder
if his amputated leg is
yet encased in the gray
chino trouser leg.

I wipe away my tears and kneel
at the grave of my son. Breasting
miles of pain down the path
across the seas of loss.

Like the frozen rain I've turned to
ice. My heart opens to the
wound of longing.
Slowly I walk hand in hand with the
shadow of death hovering above
the live Oaks dripping with Spanish
moss. A robin red breast
circles the grass coming to rest
next to my firstborn marking the
spot where I will lie in my last sleep.