My mournful soul, you, sorrowing

For all my friends around,

You have become the burial vault

Of all those hounded down.

Devoting to their memory

A verse, embalming them,

In torment, broken, lovingly

Lamenting over them,

In this our mean and selfish time,

For conscience and for quest

You stand—a columbarium

To lay their souls to rest.

The sum of all their agonies

Has bowed you to the ground.

You smell of dust, of death’s decay,

Of morgue and burial mound.

My beggarly, dejected soul,

You heard and saw your fill;

Remembered all and mixed it well,

And ground it like a mill.

Continue pounding and compound

All that I witnessed here

To graveyard compost, as you did

For almost forty years.