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Richard Wilhelm is a painter and poet who was a founding member of the Ibbetson Street Press and one of the co-editors of the 2000 anthology, City of Poets: 18 Boston Voices. His poems have appeared in Spare Change News, The Somerville Times, Ibbetson Street, and several other journals and anthologies.

THE GRAVEYARD IN SANDWICH

Richard Wilhelm

Nestled near the roadside in a graveyard obscured
by maple shrub, a row of cedar and pine,
are bleached markers succumbed to moss and vine,
some stones so weathered no names can be conjured.
A few flags flutter over Grand Army men
who fought at Gettysburg, Antietam, Second Bull Run—
all rest by the roadside, their duty and lives done.
Some lives were long; most were shorter then.
I stopped at a low stone of a family long gone—
a father, mother, twin babies survived one day.
A sorrow filled my heart, and turning my head,
I imagined the grief, then lives that went on–
My eyes were tearing over stones that display
just a name, two dates from which we conceive the dead.

— Richard Wilhelm

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