Neighborhood Voices

Neighborhood Voices

By David Walsh

I grew up next to a cemetery,
played baseball in an empty field
with headstones a short home run to right,
left field not yet occupied by the dead.
 
We kids feared voices from moonlit stones,
yet dared to shelter ourselves
in sleeping bags near pitcher’s mound,
teens blowing cigarettes at the stars.
 
Our village history was a timeline,
dated stones running up cemetery hill
in reverse order through ten generations,
hard facts of birth and death.
 
We collected stories
from intricate scrolled verse,
Epitaphs on the bottom of the oldest lives
before the granite crumbled and forgot.
 
My father’s grave stands in full view
of the deck on my mother’s house,
his voice echoes in who I am
even as distance and time grow deeper.
 
I search voices of neighbors in that field.
I do not wait until my dates
are etched upon a stone, waiting
for feet of a wary child chasing a ball.

This was the eight most-read piece of 2022.

David Walsh grew up in rural upstate New York and spent his career working for local and state government. His interests include history; the impact of technology on society; and baseball. His poetry has appeared in Spitball, NINE, museum of americana, Manhattanville Review, Haibun Today, Adirondack Review, and From Whispers to Roars.  David and his wife, Pam, live in the capital region of New York.

Jack C. Buck lives in Boise, Idaho. He is the author of the books Deer Michigan and Gathering View.

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