This tract, woven in by concrete and traffic,
this city cemetery, populated by pines,
wildflowers, birds and the departed,
boasts two famous residents, both poets,
who spent their last years here in Camden.
I visit them both today.

One, Walt Whitman, needs no introduction.
I introduce myself, silently, before the family mausoleum.
Behind the iron gate, the names of his parents and brothers,
adjacent to his, decorate the wall. There, he is just another
member of the family. But above the tomb,
the triangular cornice gives him top billing.
Nestled under a small hill, guarded by mountain laurel,
it seems an unassuming place.
One would almost expect instead,
a giant buried in a mountain.

Just down the path lies another poet,
Nick Virgilio, not quite the household name,
but an American haiku master.
His gravestone, flanked with day lilies, is a granite lectern
overlooking a pond. Every year, friends and admirers
gather to celebrate his birthday, with cake, champagne
and haiku, read from that stone podium.
I attend the event today, and as I read my own haiku,
a snowy egret watches from the pond.

These two men, who died a century apart,
were very different in a way –
one wrote expressive, rhapsodic odes to the Union,
to nature, to himself. The other strove all his life
for concision, a story in seventeen syllables or less.
But both shared a love of the natural world, and that
makes this setting the perfect resting place.

They inspire me here, yet walking between their graves,
I feel the conflicting pull, as though from one magnet
with opposite poles.

07/07/2003

Posted on 07/08/2003
Copyright © 2024 Bruce W Niedt