Cemetery Road

Joseph V. Danoski

I took a wrong turn down cemetery road,

To avoid a big truck with a heavy load.

A sharp turn of the wheel, I just made the curve;

The brakes starting to squeal, the car in a swerve.

Just avoided a crash, broken bones and glass;

A body on the asphalt, blood on the grass.

A crow out of nowhere suggested I slow;

Although it was summer, it started to snow.

I passed miles of stones on a road without end,

Through the land of the dead with no fork or bend.

Just miles of names and graves to my left and right,

All becoming a blur as day turned to night.

I recalled Frost’s poem about the miles to go,

And the legended tomb in the gloom by Poe.

That misty mid-region between time and place,

And Yeats’ wood of nothing and a lake of space.

Now the end of the road where the stones are blank;

How could I be driving with an empty tank?

I took a wrong turn down cemetery road,

To avoid a big truck with a heavy load.

There’s a vision in my headlights up ahead;

An iron gate filling me with unnamed dread.

Black crows in the shadows, oh the wings of Fate;

Saying, “We’ve been waiting,

As always, you’re late.”

Joseph V. Danoski, Dojonaki05@Netscape.Net and dojonaki05@aim.com, lives happily on the plains of his imagination in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Under the pen name “Jonathan Konrad,” he published his first poetry chap book, Shock Waves: Letters from the Edge, in 1987. It has been favorably reviewed and is available from the poet for $6.95. Many of his poems have also been published in his city newspaper, The Berlin Reporter, and, by request—for the 1997 Berlin Centennial—he delivered his poem “The City Built from Trees” at City Hall. Preferring speculative fiction, the author also loves writing letters and essays, playing music, gardening, and stargazing. Publications have appeared in Penny Dreadful, Pivot, Psychopoetica (UK), The Nocturnal Lyric, The Quest (India) and The Aurorean.