Highgate cemetery, Est. 1839

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