The WriteAngles Journal 2026 submissions are coming in!
Thank you Chaya Grossberg for this excellent poem.
So Many Cemeteries
by Chaya Grossberg
In New England, where there are so many cemeteries,
small and large
and so many snow plows and snowstorms, small and large,
where the snow storms get plowed right up by morning and if not, the people complain,
the cemeteries do not get plowed, not the small ones anyway.
So by the end of a winter like this, they are piled high with unbroken snow,
gravestones 75% buried,
each one peeking out like a tab in a binder or a bookmark in a thick book.
Gravestones do not need to be accessed at all times.
Instead, they are the yardsticks of the entire winter of accumulation,
clean snow, unbroken,
no footprints or tracks or slush for the time being,
those gravestones are untouched.
Those gravestones, the only places in town, where a perfect landscape sustains a little while,
burying names and years, carved into stone,
buried once and buried again.
Lifelong poet, fiction and non-fiction writer Chaya has been writing and sharing poetry for 3 decades. She recently published poetry books, “Reborn: Poetic Codes for Psychiatric Survivors” and “Daylilies Wild as Night”.