Why is this beautiful? Christian asks. How do you decide
on the six most beautiful cemeteries in the world?
He speaks of Magellan, of narrow waters, of time
and coins, errors and bones of the disappeared:
we must coin a more vast, luminous, and plural memory.
And Ellen speaks of the Utrecht Psalter, rivers
flowing from paradise, elephants and dragons.
Both evil and comedy were real in those days.
People wanted true stories. It has never been easy.
And the violin came at the same time, Jim says,
while the bold explorers rode the waves into new lands—
yes, new to them. It takes a big tree and centuries
to make a double bass. When stories are lost,
the whole society is wounded. And the Spanish burned
the Mayan Codices, because God, because they could.
And Brazil outlawed slavery only in 1888, says Camilla.
Coffee, sugar cane, pineapple. Those outlandish early maps,
giant insects and monsters, mirrors of fears and desires.
And photos: men climbing a cliff, packed close as bees.
Might our forgotten thoughts be adapted by others, passing by?
In 1800 Alexander von Humboldt saw it: the world
is a great web! He wrote forty brilliant books—
Thoreau and Whitman read him, the Brits too.
Yet even today some of us hate dandelions,
some don’t. They are immigrants, but they make food
for bees, shine golden in their time, do little harm.
Without flowers, we’d none of us be here.
I am learning: you can try hard to love your home,
learn all you can, and still have it fall to ruin around you.
When the smoke moves south, the borders mean nothing.
—
Jeff Gundy’s thirteen books of poetry and nonfiction include, Wind Farm: Landscape with Stories and Towers (Dos Madres, creative nonfiction) and Without a Plea (Bottom Dog, poems). Recent work appears in Georgia Review, The Sun, River Teeth, Kenyon Review, Forklift, Ohio, Christian Century, Cincinnati Review, and Terrain.org. He serves as 2023-25 Writer in (Non)Residence at Bluffton University, and is at work on a project with the working title Phantom Power(s).
