Digging graves -
at my age every day
someone, some insistent ring
in the silence of night
or smack in the middle
of sunlight and laughter,
but one image floats
above it all,
you with that bandanna
tied around your head
there in our desert
garden with the heavy
shovel digging,
sweat pouring, I knew,
at the unaccustomed labor.
You turn over hard earth
beneath the loam, making
a natural bed for her ashes,
golden child we made.
She is not there, my inner
voice calls out.
She lives, oh yes,
somewhere she dances.
Bettie Anne Doebler is retired from many years of teaching English. She now devotes herself to writing poetry. Thirty of her poems have been published in a book, Book of the Mermaid, and in 1994 she published a book of literary criticism, "Rooted Sorrow:" Dying in Early Modern England. She has suffered from strains of depression, both in her family of birth and her own close family, particularly with the suicides of her daughter and her husband.