Bodies, Flowerbeds: A Villanelle
The earth, carved up, engraved with bodies,
this hollow vision of death: people resting
together, bodies beneath a bed of flowers.
We soften death into poems and stories.
The art of writing is just a way of wailing
for the earth, carved up, sculpted by bodies.
In Cameroon, hair from the dead is carried,
mixed with camwood and kept; the living
remember bodies beneath beds of flowers.
What we seek through our endless studies
sits beyond death, but the path to it is sinking
into a carved-up earth, paved with bodies.
The sharp shovel of silence briefly remedies
the ear deaf to the voices of the dead, linking
it to slender-petaled tongues in a flowerbed.
A poem or a story is an etching of memories,
dignity in the fragile face of loss. Soothing
the earth, carved up, engraved with bodies,
we hum together beside a bed of flowers.
Viola Allo
Viola Allo is a Cameroonian-born poet based in the United States. Raised in Cameroon by her Cameroonian father and American mother. In 2010, Viola received an Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation fellowship to attend the UC Davis Tomales Bay Workshops. In 2011, her poem "Nigerian Girl with Calabash" was published in US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan's community college poetry anthology, Poetry for the Mind's Joy.
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