Alive, I marveled

at the end of your uncle’s
graveside service, waiting
in the van, a hundred yards from you

and the white pop-up tent while I
sat enclosed by sunbleached headstones
benign as merlons of a fallen castle.

There is a time for everything
and for everyone
the lamp will go out:

for you, for me, for the glass bottle
wheeze of our napping toddler,

for Leroy M. Gallup,
his fire snuffed out since 1918,
for his elderly

great-granddaughter out in the rain. I watched her
grip his gravestone, crouch down
to anchor a plastic pinwheel

beside his epitaph. I saw everything
through a beaded windshield,

not darkly,
not clearly,
but magnified. Love,

I don’t know a thing

about Leroy M. Gallup;
I barely knew uncle Mike,

but what I knew then
was alive: to marvel at you
in the mid-June drizzle,

left hand gripping
a rose, program, and hem of your skirt
as you tip-toed back

through the wet grass, umbrella synced
with your quickened step. You know

I could have pulled further ahead,
and I knew
you’d tell me as much,

eyes flickering, I hoped,
from that furnace still blazing inside.

--
Ryan Apple is a music professor at a small Christian college in Lansing, MI. His chapbook, Stars and Sparrows Alike, was published in November 2020 through Finishing Line Press. Ryan is also one of ten poets featured in the Poiema Poetry Series anthology In a Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets.