The metaphors of Spring are not subtle...
...especially when life springs from rock that holds in the dead. This is Salem Fields Cemetery in Cypress Hills, a fascinating neighborhood perched on the Graveyard Greenbelt that knits together Brooklyn and Queens, and it is our Guest Park of the Day.
I picnicked there yesterday on my lunch hour from a teaching gig, just as the Victorians used to do at Green-Wood Cemetery before they had nearby Prospect Park. This gate was locked, but the main arch at Jamaica and Euclid Avenues stood open on a cool and glorious noon.
This magnolia's vigor seemed shocking against a landscape of blue sky and tombstones. The cemetery is a German-Jewish one, mostly; I didn't happen upon them, but buried here are William Fox (the "Twentieth Century" film magnate), Harry Guggenheim (founder of Newsday), and impressario Lee Shubert (he of the Broadway "alley").
A broken column is a classic bit of funerary iconography for life cut short, but nature made its own version after our recent rough weather with this broken tree. How much more eloquent it is than any statuary!
These charming cherubs probably signify a child's tomb. The countless children in old cemeteries always make me wonder how parents' hearts held up in those days before routine vaccinations and antibiotics, when you could bury one little one after another.
This more mature angel sighed nearby. The cool breeze seemed to blow away melancholy, just leaving wistfulness. My eye was drawn to the stone by my mother's unusual name, Mathilde, here a grieving mother for a five-year-old girl.
The inscription read:
WIR LIEBTEN DICH IM LEBEN
WIR LIEBEN DICH IM TOD
GOTT GAB DICH
GOTT NAHM DICH
GOTT LINDERE UNSERE NOTH
Translated by Google, that means:
We loved you in life
We love you in death
God gave you
God took you
God alleviate our distress
As I sat eating my turkey sandwich amid the deceased, and pondering the short life of little Evelyn Sophie, Father Mark Lane was blessing an even tinier casket at our family's Catholic parish church in downtown Brooklyn—that of little Louis Dewayne Mosely, who was recently beaten to death in foster care and would that afternoon be interred in the cemetery across the street from Salem Fields. “We don’t have any rewind button on life," said my pastor. "No matter how much justice demands it, it doesn’t happen.”
This same pastor once described a mystery as "a truth so deep that we can never reach the bottom, no matter how often we go back to the well." With each passing year, I find myself more grateful for the well of springtime.
Right: Window, mausoleum interior, Salem Fields Cemetery
We're heading to those parts, the "graveyard greenbelt," today. Wish us luck. We're looking for Houdini, who may have escape his final confinement...
Posted by: Matthew | April 17, 2011 at 09:26 AM