One hundred acres of dead,
and my feet aching.
Trees one hundred feet tall
and one hundred years old,
and the years these dead had lived
carved into stones beneath
their names and dissolving in the rain.
How can we tell we are dead
if our hair is still growing?
How can we go on living
when we know it won’t be forever?

I ate handfuls of sunflower seeds
out of a black grocery bag,
watching the way we forget
our dead and feeling
ridiculous while cars drove by
me, all of us looking at the stones
we would one day dissolve under
and feeling our hair
grow out of our heads
slower than the trees were tall.