St. Martin’s Cemetery

(New Derry, Westmoreland County, PA) Grandfather Lawrence, whom I never knew, I wonder what appeasing light, if any, may have eased your pain and strengthened you as blind and bleeding underneath the many winding caverns of the hellish earth, your starved lungs gasping for a final breath, you prayed for some miraculous rebirth to justify the agony of death. But what your friends could rescue from the ground resembled only contours of a man. And none dared utter words or make a sound when Hilda (mother of my mother) ran and tried to recognize your blackened face, then covered it with light from her embrace.