The Pity

Pieta: a mother cradles a grown man.
A woman carries her father, scrawny limbs
drape her breasts. She hefted strained muscles,
coiled in the heart nerves frayed with grief

for a journey bypassing the town marked
by death – the end comes at a different time
to each person unlike the year when the plague struck,
took away the brother and sister the same day.

Why is a graveyard called a burning forest?
When I married into the family I learned
to discern the depth of sorrow in the way
dust swirled into a hurricane under chairs.

The slats crusted with mercurial light,
a string of shorter questions flapped in a line
of thought dried out in the yard: weighty
wetness upended between poles of pain.