Père Lachaise
Aisling Smith (Monash University, Australia)
The swallows are swallowed by sunset
but one lingering skywriter still shapes a word,
A man in a quilted vest who wants to scribble on the sky
with all the arrogance of humankind
We promised we would remember the light
but already the air forgets, growing cool and dim;
The towering graves settle into their mossy soil, their elegant sanctuary,
They do not change for sun or moon
They keep their silences, their secrets
encouraged by those who lie supine down below,
But were once creatures of day and warmth themselves
—the ones you have come to see
The shadowed grey cobblestones know all the history
like the last fight for a shining utopian ideal and that wall
Where men once stood close, breathing shallowly in their fear
was vindicated as they fell
and stained those same stones brightly.
Now tourists walk there in Reeboks and Converse,
kneel on those uneven stones to tie shoelaces, take photos of that wall
and the wreaths freshly laid below.
It is sad here as well—the overly small tombs
the cursive dates on their pale headstones too contracted:
Aged one, two, three years old, you do the math on your fingers,
but no explanation rewards your efforts
So you make up your own sorrowful story
fit it to the inevitable ending, the forlorn conclusion
You can do the same thing with the images painted on the stone
the luminous faces, stern and sweet alike
But all are bound together by their grand resting place
and whether created from love or fear or pride does not matter,
These tombs of marble and flower and paint are always saying one thing:
These people were worth remembering.
Aisling Smith is a Melbourne based writer. She is also a doctoral candidate in Literary Studies at Monash University, an editor of the 2017 Verge Anthology and co-editor-in-chief of Colloquy: text, theory, critique.
