David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Black Civil War Soldier at a Cemetery’s Outskirts

Bodies are not all that are buried in cemeteries. Stories with their juxtapositions and confluences lie among the monuments, but are mostly as invisible as bones returning to dust. Narratives connecting or separating the interred are often forgotten to all except relatives or history aficionados. But sometimes a visitor is serendipitously struck by a splicing or conjunction of circumstance making a statement about the past that is telling to the present.

Hillside Cemetery in Unionville, Connecticut is a steep wedge of land rising above the intersection of three busy roads. A circular concrete drive embedded with large chunks of aggregate separates a grassy inner sphere of gravesites from an outer ring of memorials on high ground at a forested edge. The slope has required terracing, resulting in a series of picturesque retaining walls and associated steps that make for an intriguing series of levels and alcoves.

Skim Milk Sky (poem)

    Historic Wildfires Rage in Western States
        The New York Times, 9/10/20

Beneath hazy skies tinged skim-milk-blue,
I feel pressure, a weight
where New England’s endless azure
September should lighten my steps.
Weirdly visible, air is soot-smudged from blazes

devouring California’s homes and hillsides,
the sun’s eye clouded by a smoky cataract.
A slight, acrid scent brings me back
to days cutting line with a Pulaski, spritzing hotspots
from a backpack tank, old stumps

burning like braziers, snags falling
and splintering, foliage crackling like foil
in long hours of sweat, heat, and adrenalin-
rushed heartbeats. Having witnessed the savage
hunger of flames, I envision charred wreckage

and broken lives in these soft flannel skies,
the sooty air filled with heaven’s portion of forests
reduced to ragged shadows. Time’s gradual click
plays tricks on human minds,
and slow-paced climate change seems a future

exceeding our grasp. I live in a digital age
that scoffs at ancients who augured with meteor
and eclipse, but by merely looking upward
into a cloudless monotony of gray, I know
we connect to California with every breath.

Photo courtesy of Leo Kulinski, Jr.  www.leokulinskijr.com

Strictly Dirt (poem)

Not even clouds are so diverse, so beautiful, and terrible as the soil under your feet.
        Karel Capek

Like shards of fallen rainbow,
flower gardens glow
yellow, red, orange
and indigo in summer sun.

But gardeners know
the secrets of floral color grow
in dirt and dark,

where soil is life,
tangy sweet to the nose,
soft, crumbly in hand,

a mineral and humus miracle
churning with mites, rotifers,
insects and nematodes.

Ground fertilized with sweat,
blooms pollinated by imagination,
we feed earth’s hunger
for seeds, ours for hope.