Reread for Review

Boxes of Brown
molly losey

In those days we buried people in boxes brown
wood. We traded our smiling flushed faces for black
sullen ones. We ate humble pie and branded ourselves red
with guilt for what we could have done, and we hated the shade
of the grass. It was still green, still alive
when the people we loved were dead.

Remorse comes togehter with the smell of cypress and the dead
air of the sanctury matched the shade
the preacher prayed. His heavy, black
typewritten words with a gold paved certainty they were still alive
someplace beyond the brown
earth in which we were about to leave them and their red

sweaters. We cried hollow tears, ones that were red,
guilty, responsible, maybe. They were the dead
ones, but we, we were just as cold and black,
as inwardly lifeless as skin faded from brown
to an unmoving gray. We hastened to shade
ourselves from such a fate, absorbing the sacraments and coming alive

again. Now it’s a novelty, this being alive;
contradicted by the shade
of sackcloth reasoning and prayer that browns
and wilts with the heat of the slow burning fire. Thirsty and red,
forever at our backs faith won’t settle for dead,
will never leave us charcoaled and black.

Skirts and suits are embraces of black,
their toothy mouths slopping out red
words from the New Testament. Alive
as they say, means that the only dead
is sin. The living suffering the blandness of brown,
a dull sorry existence, an unpolished shade.

The day for us ended with the closing of windows and drawing of shades.
Tomorrow will be new, shining, alive.
We, we though, will have eyes that are red,
hearts that know only what it is to be black,
aching in such a way that we, too, become dead
and buried in a box that is brown.

In the black brown shade of the lonely red earth,
if the dead are weeping and gnashing their teeth,
and their red, tearstained stories tell they’re yet, yet alive.

--fall 2007

I will never never forget how I felt when I wrote the first draft of this poem and shared it with my poetry class. Never.