WORKING ON HOPE
Soil-strips that framed his plot
are gone.
And ocher cloak that
spoke of death
has long since come alive
in shamrock green.
(The same as grass along its sides
that never was disturbed.)
I wouldn’t know,
to see this now,
that death was real;
had ever been.
Except for weathered headstone—
a memory cut off
with jagged edge
right in the middle of everything.
       Steve Dunn Hanson

Orange, California 2004