All Eternity to Love the Dead

Trinity Chester

O Antigone, with dirt under your fingernails,
I cannot weep and wail for my unburied dead.
The gods are gone, gone—
And I am more blind than your father.

So I will wipe the tarnish from my silver spoon,
And dig a hole, one spoonful at a time
Into the dead earth.
I will make a grave for broken things.

Not enough, not enough for an offering to the gods.
But let them not be angered. For I do not know justice
And your father sinned even in trying to be good.

I was never brave enough to ask Tiresias what he saw
With those pale eyes of his.
But still, the nakedness of grief is clothed with sun-warmed soil,
And flowers grow from the burial mounds of the dead.

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Trinity Chester lives in Denver, a stone’s throw from the mountains, where she works in the nonprofit sector by day and moonlights as a poet and philosopher. A graduate of Thomas Aquinas College, where she read Great Books and fulfilled her childhood dream of being a librarian, she has long found herself captivated by the written word in all its forms. Her writing has been published in Trivium as well as Philanthropy Daily.