After Hurricane Katrina, Words For My Grandmother Poem by W.M. Rivera

(Jeannette McLeod Hayes Moser,1899-1965) .
-The above ground tombs in New Orleans cemeteries are often referred to as “cities of the dead.”


Decomposed years ago in summer heat,
you float in an above-ground tomb, wet
in the current delta's swelter,
an imaginary you, captive in a cryptic world.

In New Orleans, give or take a year, the dead
get pushed aside, swept quick into burial
bags – sprinkled after on the previous
layers of ancestral ash – to let the latest
grief pile on. That done, now there's this
hurricane brings you back; gnaws at me once
more – this presence, your absence; something

I thought settled, your remains, an overflow
beyond the confines of this flooded site.