Because I have buried your fathers
you think the shovelman
looks death in the eye,
therefore is part of the murder.
I tell you I seldom see the eyes of the dead.
They are latched tight by the time
the corpses roll up to my feet.
Their lids are slammed by the anger
of failing to live forever.
Or they have simply grown weary of
opening and opening empty doors.
I tell you I am only here to close the lids,
to let their last breaths fall gently from our arms
like leaves in a cage full of dying wind.
Old friends, we are all changing colors
and falling off.
[This poem was first
published in Bent Pin Quarterly (Vol.
2, No. 4, Fall 2008)]
Robert S.
King has published two chapbooks and
individual poems in hundreds of magazines, including The Kenyon Review, The Chariton Review, Southern Poetry Review,