Soul

My mournful soul, you, sorrowing For all my friends around, You have become the burial vault Of all those hounded down. Devoting to their memory A verse, embalming them, In torment, broken, lovingly Lamenting over them, In this our mean and selfish time, For conscience and for quest You stand-a columbarium To lay their souls to rest. The sum of all their agonies Has bowed you to the ground. You smell of dust, of death's decay, Of morgue and burial mound. My beggarly, dejected soul, You heard and saw your fill; Remembered all and mixed it well, And ground it like a mill. Continue pounding and compound All that I witnessed here To graveyard compost, as you did For almost forty years.