Grave Diggers - July 8, 2024

with daybreak services and gravestone

visits during daylight hours

I imagine they work only in the dark

digging rectangular holes among hundreds

of other boxed and buried corpses

but it’s that once-a-month full moon

when one must flick off the bobcat’s lights

and dig by the dull glow of the night’s

candle that makes me wonder

if every spooky story read and

scary movie watched awakens

with each crunch of shovel into soil

and plop of dirt on its pile

does he stop to listen  exhale a long

slow breath of fog into the walled

darkness and peer across

the endless rows of headstones

and hope a distant movement he sees

is merely a branch’s dancing shadow

and the hot breath on his neck is just

the machine catching its idling breath

or that sudden tap on the side window

of his cab is not worth turning to look at

because it must be something the wind

kicked up and threw at him

on this otherwise deathly still night