Poetry By
Karen Douglass
Published on: 6/25/2012
The Borrowed Grave
Grandfather Hill died too young to own a plot, left his wife too poor to buy one. Friends offered consecrated space among their dead. The widow sighed, buried him, remarried. The new husband said, "A man should lie among his own. I'll pay to dig him up and send him there." But the priest waved his hand, "His family lies in heathen ground. I will not let the body go." And the widow said, "Watch me!" Brought men with shovels and a sheriff, and the borrowed grave opened and the second grave welcomed him to sleep among his kin, and his wife lies deep beside another man in ground which generosity makes holy, and a voice from the past whispers, "When I died, she planted me where I did not rest easy. Now I am a name in a book where my story leads you by the hand. The old shepherd lost a lamb when that priest denied her the right to move my bones. I know what they did not, that a body cannot but be buried in sacred space, as the Earth is blessed by its own being.
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