Practical, we take the names of our dead
because the dead are sturdy — stern mantles
of opportunity, watching as we shoulder them
from windowpanes, closets. Rose — one curling r
makes hundreds of us, Rachels, Rivkas, Renates,
Richards, Ronalds, this slip of a woman
in a fading photograph keeps all our tongues
moving. Blessed are you, lord of our passed-on,
our looking-over-us-on-high, as the dead name us
consonant, as we cast aside the baby books and run
curious to the headstones, hunting for names
among the mausoleums and weather-worn
statues, the roses gone to pulp beside the roses
freshly brought, red and resonant.
Rachel Mennies is the author of “The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards “(Texas Tech University Press, 2014), winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry. She teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and is a member of AGNI’s editorial staff.
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