The Graves Back Home

Never quiet, the graves back home,
Mom prodding Pop in their bed, “You’re snoring!”
Grandma exclaiming to Grandpa for the millionth time,
“Smoking that pipe will kill you someday,” and Great-
grandpa in Czech-laced exasperation reminding
bullheaded Great-grandma to “Talk American!”

Ear protection is desirable, given Cousin Benny’s
raunchy jokes, Uncle Emmanuel’s swearing about
some poker hand dealt him, and garrulous
Uncle Henry’s bending of ears regarding the virtues
of bulls whose sales he’s constantly brokering—Aunt
Agnes groaning, “Dear Henry, take your bulls outside!”

My ears unearth chatter all the way back
to the mid-‘50s when the only death I’d grieved
was my dog Toby’s—almost everyone else then
blithely talking about the weather and crops,
the price of hay, and what had become of the world
with polio, the A-bomb and communism’s threat.

Holidays, holy days, joys and sorrows—
their words and lives withstanding time, though
neither quite here nor there, like Sis, my dear Sis,
parroting from just beyond Death’s leaky fourth wall
our parents’ warning she herself couldn’t heed:
“Don’t go in the deep end until you can swim.”

Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His work appears in Verse-Virtual, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, San Antonio Review, Amethyst Review, and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). Father of five and grandfather of seven, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin with his wife of more than 50 years.