“Memento Mori” by Minab Yetbarek
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Memento Mori” by Minab Yetbarek.
Memento Mori
By Minab Yetbarek
(the Schara Tzedeck)
Black headstones blossom
even in winter
like rows of spring buds
frozen in the snow
on the everyday commute to workโ
the second third of life beside sleepโ
in the grave garden
from 22nd Street to Edmonds
staring back at the skytrain
moving, from mundane to mundane
and the plot expands every year
as the black plaques multiply
and the sight bookends each dayโ
passing a cemetery from the sky each way
what we were told not to do as childrenโ
and the Star of David hangs over it all
like a reminder of some evil long ago
how death, though in the distance
must always be remembered
or how some other has died today
in some country far away
and how powerless one is
in the face of cyclic history
of black stones blossoming
even in winter.
Copyright ยฉ Minab Yetbarek
Minab is an Eritrean-Canadian writer and translator. He lives and works in Vancouver, BC. He’s a member of the Society of Translators and Interpreters of BC, and the Literary Translators Association of Canada, serving briefly for LTAC’s Poetry Magazine Ellipse as an editor for the Tigrinya language. He writes both in his native Tigrinya and English, besides translating as widely as poetry to philosophy.
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