John Ziegler

Cemetery in Towamencin

When the last one
who remembers you is gone,
it’s over.

On yellowed pages, I find the names,
Caspar, Balthasar, Melchior,
my Schwenkfelder forebears who fled Silesia
in wooden ships
to escape persecution
and burial in un-sacred ground.

Melchior, in white shirt and vest,
wool trousers, bunched at the knee.

In their pasture he stands beside Lydia.
She sits on a ladder back chair,
gauze cap over her pinned hair,
pale hands like small birds,
folded on her apron.

In this small Pennsylvania village
Melchior, worked his field, while
Lydia made garden, raised chickens,
and nine children.

Some died.
They were displayed by the altar rail
beneath satin coverlets in diminutive coffins.
Buggies hitched to the post outside waited
to carry them to sacred ground.

In a cemetery in Towamencin,
I stand before their gravestones,
worn as the slate doorsill
in their native land,
buried here and nearly forgotten.
__________

Old Photos

In a grease-stained biscuit box in the attic
I find packets of old photos,
some with names
penciled on the back.

My grandfather wears a brown fedora,
hoists a string of pickerel,
their soft slippery tails
wet against his boot.

In another he wears a dark necktie,
shirt buttoned to the throat,
as he cradles his shotgun.

Two limp Chinese pheasants
hang from his wide belt.
A black cigar clamped in his teeth.

In this picture Grandmother stares
from a filigreed silver frame,
her ivory-yellow hair coiled,
a soft mole on her powdered cheek,

this grandmother I lived with,
this grandmother I took for granted like furniture,

now pale and shrunken,
not much bigger than a child.
Soon relatives and friends
in Sunday clothes,
silent in the hallway,

dark carpets and heavy drapes,
the piquant smell of mums,
somber organ music in the walls.

__________

 

Croup

If I wake hoarse and barking,
she catches me by the elbow
and collects her kit from the whatnot shelf.

The brown tin cup is placed
on the cast iron grill
over the blue gas flame.

A finger of translucent ointment
fished from the blue jar
is wiped into the cup to melt.

She rolls a newspaper cone
to concentrate the assault
of vapors rising in the air,
wavery like a washboard.

Ice splinters shock my nasal passages,
eyes pinch and lungs suddenly expand,
there is no escape.

A gob of Vicks is smeared into
my honey hollow, a brindle rag
is wrapped across my throat.

Oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar
is ladled into an earthenware bowl
with a yellow rooster painted on the side.

There will be school for me today.

__________

John Ziegler is a poet and painter, gardener and traveler, originally from Pennsylvania, he recently migrated to a mountain village in Northern Arizona.