Poems Niederngasse

 Rosemarie Crisafi

 Looking for a Grave in Brooklyn

 A glacier left Brooklyn's highest point
 the cemetery's summit, where
 once, you could see the mirrors
 of the World Trade Centers.
 Iron fence
 crowned with barbed wire
 encloses obelisks and mausoleums
 built into knolls.
 Winds frees
 dandelion's gossamer balls
 which disperse
 into a million parachutes.
 Paratroopers
 land the burial slopes
 opening white canopies
 on grass and gravestones. 

 My Sicilian grandmother died
 on a New Years Eve
 on a expanding Bethlehem star.
 Wrinkles furrowed on the quilt.
 Astral curls pulsed silver
 then paled
 disappearing in Green-Wood Cemetery
 beside her dockworker husband.

 She floats over memorials
 in labyrinths of tombstones,
 near civil war monuments,
 Leonard Bernstein and Boss Tweed
 by Albert Anastasi
 of Murder Incorporated;
 past Roosevelts and Adams.
 Green umbrellas shade vaults
 of the famed, marking their province
 with a garden of shrines.

 In a corner of this park, I find,
 in a grotto of shade, unblinking,
 her gaze lustrous in the plumage
 of Chinese Geese
 who live here, willowy bills weeding,
 almost swans except
 for round forehead knobs.
 A goose holds her head high.
 It flows with grace
 into a curved neck.

Rosemarie Crisafi lives in Wappingers Falls, New York. She works in for a non-for-profit agency that serves individuals with disabilities. Her poetry has been published in The Rose & the Thorn, The Quill and Ink, Locust Magazine, Poetic Diversity, Eclectica Magazine, The Surface, Facets A Literary Magazine, Poetry Super Highway, Wicked Alice Poetry Journal, SubtleTea, Great Works, Red River Review, Millers Pond, Canopic Jar, 2River View, Nthposition, Rock Salt Plum Poetry Review, Tin Lustre Mobil, Poems Niederngasse, Astropoetica, Ancient Paths, Full Moon Magazine Caught In the
Net, and Experimental Poetry.com.   email:  R.Crisafi