It's good to be back home after six weeks of travel. First, London, then California and, finally, South Bend, IN for my granddaughter's college graduation. This poem takes me back to London with it's crowds and rich history around every corner.
Highgate Cemetery, Est.1839
The famous ones interred here,
Michael Faraday, George Eliot,
Henry Moore and so many others,
roll their eyes at details ascribed
to them, powerless to set straight
the record.
He of the proletariat, Karl Marx,
prowls around his outsized monument,
grumpy at the grandiosity.
Members of the Dickens family
roam rudderless without Charles,
buried in Westminster's Poet Corner.
Poisoned with polonium, Sasha
Litvinenko keens for his wind blown
steppes, forever unreachable.
Plots still available for a price
amid 53,000 plus gravesites, jostling
with one another, juxtaposed randomly.
Too many tombs for this cemetery.
Too many weeping trees and voyeuristic
visitors. Too many earthbound roots
for me.
Marilyn Aschoff Mellor
