The Broken Obelisks

Beneath an old crape myrtle weeping Spanish moss on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River stand two broken obelisks – side by side – in a small cemetery. Two lives cut short. They were brothers.

Their broken pillars are joined by their mother’s, which is complete – a life lived full. The plot was once surrounded by an ornate wrought iron fence, now almost completely gone, leaving only the gate, which seems to warn those who enter that there is much sadness here. And, of course, death.

Joseph Neibert was 11 years, five months, nine days old when he died a year before his brother, Thomas was born.

On Thomas’s obelisk is the following inscription:

Thomas Bird Neibert

Born August 11, 1836, Natchez, Mississippi

Died June 22, 1858, Carrollton, Louisiana

The following lines written by himself and published in the New Orleans Delta almost two years before his death would seem to have been influenced by a foreshadowing or premonition of his early entrance into that new life which he now so fully enjoys:

A New Life

Ever, ever more regarding
Suns that long have had their setting,
Dreading future steeps to climb
I have lingered faint and weary,
Looking backward to the time
When my being, fresh and cheery,
Hastened onward to its prime.

Now, with brighter visions burning
From the past my spirit turning
In the future seeks its home.
Angel wings are folded o’er me
And I listen, rapt and dumb,
To the loved ones gone before me
While they whisper, “Brother, come.”

One unseen is ever near me,
Buried brother risen in light
With his thrilling angel fingers
Clasped in mine, my way is bright.
And my spirit no more lingers,
Murmuring o’er its springtime flight.

My great grandmother had a little boy who died when he was a year old named Joseph Neibert. I suspect we are somehow related to these brothers, but had never heard of them before my trip to the old cemetery two days ago.

I’ve heard tell that a broken obelisk means the person died by suicide. I hope it isn’t true, but wouldn’t be surprised. We’ve had suicides in our family. Poets, too.

The Tractor

It stood motionless.
The Deere at the edge of the woods,
as though waiting for something to,
someone to bring the come-along
and finish what we started.

The bushes moved in -- guerilla soldiers, stealthy.
The bush hog lay wounded in the grass.
And standing in that patch of angled sunlight,
the heat ticking off the hours
and days and years of reflection
and rejection,it seemed as though

I heard a sigh. The trees, their reply
showered leaves like trouble
you'd just as soon forget. Birds
burst forth with screams.
Why? Why?

Had the tractor been brought
to clear the brush or had the brush
moved in to claim the tractor?
Who was the warrior here? Who the vanquished?

Insect battalions chant their nightly ululations
and the creepers crawl.
Like a Confederate soldier
who fought someone else's war,
the Deere stands a silent sentinel, slowly bleeding
precious oil into the ground and asks
us to remember, or at least to not forget.

Will man ever make order out of chaos?

Listen to the land. She will tell you.
Beyond the darkening woods, behind the hill,
you can feel it in the ground.
A distant rumble growing closer.
Thunder, hoofbeats -- the coming roar.

August 14, 2006