Buried Deeply Away Till It is Gone, Yet Is Forever

We bury love,
Forgetfulness grows over it like grass;
That is a thing to weep for,
not the dead.
-- Alexander Smith (no relation)

I want to break down a poem, a verse, a thoughtful assemblage of words that are working to express emotion. That emotion can be painful to the mind and be of a torturous nature.

“We bury love,”
Love can be buried, yes, but can it ever go completely away from our thoughts? Quietly we bury the pain caused by loss. Perhaps it is a loss that was only a dream inside our heads, a fantasy, a world of our creation that was a dimension that is unknown to nature. We try to say goodbye to love in an effort to preserve integrity of our memories. Why else do we hold on to people who cause only pain in our lives? We grasp on to the love that existed before the pain, before the betrayal, before the self-destruction.

”Forgetfulness grows over it like grass;”
How green are our cemeteries, jutting with marble headstones. Proclaiming the departed’s name, statistics of birth date, day of passing from this plane and perhaps a brief verse of significant fact to try and explain the body beneath the sod. Or perhaps a stone with significant artwork to ferment the viewers mind with some thought of wonderment. But as the grass covers the shovels work, the forgetting begins, the bad memories begin to fade and the green covering makes one stare inside their head at the powerful memories of meaningful joy that were shared. Flowers may even rise among the grass and add a bit of color.

“That is a thing to weep for,”
I remember the first time I thought of my Grandmother some time after her passing. I had a memory as I drove by her house but I could not remember what her face looked like easily. Concentration on this only seemed to make it fuzzier. It took a digging out of a recent photograph of her to implant a picture to my memories of her. It happens now with all my relatives that have passed on. They seem to have the appearance of the last photograph that I viewed of them. I wonder if this is normal. What did people do before the advent of photography? Is this why people first began to have portraits painted and hung in their dwellings? Reminders to their heirs of what was gone, a visual record of sorts? Forgetting what someone looks like that we loved is enough to make you weep over it.

“not the dead.”
I will refuse to cry over the dead anymore. But I will weep for the forgetting that happens at the same time as I try to remember everything—good and bad as hell memories--before I have my own carpet of grass.