This month’s assignment was to write an anaphora, which is a poem using deliberate repetition at the beginnings of lines. The theme, in this case, was to grapple with loss and, at the same time, grace and gratitude. I’m not at all sure that I captured that, and I’m a couple of days late to this regardless, but here goes….
Buried
By Liz Garton Scanlon
We bury bulbs in the garden.
We bury the dead.
We bury the lede.
We bury love letters underneath socks and slips.
We bury the kids up to their necks in sand.
We bury treasure.
We bury our feelings.
We bury the hatchet.
We bury bills.
We bury bones.
We bury our faces in our hands.
And then it is our job
to unearth it all.
To read more anaphora, go visit my poetry sisters:
Laura’s poem
Andi’s poem
Kelly’s poem
Tricia’s poem
Tanita’s poem
Sara’s poem
…and the unearthing is the work of a lifetime.
The images you choose to accompany your poems area always intriguing and evocative. I really like this one – the sort of faded tones of everything, as if all of it has lost energy and impetus to be anything but halfway underground…
Bury is one of those words that, in repetition, suddenly seems mis-spelled to me, or as if it’s become another word altogether, which suits your poem of loss in a perfectly oblique way. As does the form, going down and down, as narrow and confined as an abandoned mine shift.
I also love how neutral you’ve left the last line….is it a good thing that it’s our job to unearth all this? Or is it a task we exasperatedly refuse?
Oooh, I adore this, Liz. So many things we bury. Ones we should and ones we should not! Some buried things need that time underground to then sprout new life. Other things are going to die if we leave them buried. This leaves me with lots of food for thought–lovely!