Poem: For Rose

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.