lives in the half-light

Life is like a cigarette...You can toke on it for awhile but, sooner or later it's gonna burn out. L.Morris

i live right across the street
to a cemetery full of people
i see them often in the late afternoon
they sit on benches in a tiny park
and they watch shadows from the sun
as it drops and cools

there are no headstones to hold the flowers,
no iron gates, no avenues lined with trees,
no wide green lawns, or burial walls
in this cemetery

there are only the wide-paned windows,
and the red brick walls, and in front of
the heavy steel door, a pretty park
with circles of marigolds and mayflowers,
and rose bushes in the corners,
and a lone lifeless tree with strings
of thin gold chains and pendants

the cemetery rouses and stirs
in the early morning hours just before the sun
the listless and sleepless are allowed into the park
to wander or walk or simple sit
as the day's first light wakes the leaves,
the flowers and their minds

the caretakers step in ceremony
as they ferry out on steel carts a tangle
of tin cups, teapots and tea biscuits
rare smiles mix with raised hands
as the tea is served and the day's
new light splashes against the red wall

and as the day moves on, it brightens
the marigolds and mayflowers, and,
the life-empty tree, and finally,
the rose bushes up against the red brick

and as it moves, it is followed warily
by streaks then smears of shadows
darker then darkening as the day ends
filling the benches with the less
anxious, the more quiet, the untroubled,
whose minds breathe in the dim light,
the murky twilight, and whose lives
are themselves caught in the half-light
and afterglow of life