POETRY

Quaker Graveyard

Nantucket Memories

Amy Jasek
1 min readSep 23, 2023

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35mm film photo by author (Quaker Graveyard, Nantucket)

Thousands of lives
under an ocean of sand
undulated and unmarked as
the years since they were
laid to rest
graves unadorned
unblemished
shy as violets
eschewing adoration
their souls set free
from the land
where their bones
plunge deep

My daughter said “you have to see the Quaker graveyard. It’s unlike any other graveyard you’ve ever experienced.” She was right, of course. And just now when I looked up a link to share with the poem I wrote after visiting it, I discovered that Robert Lowell also wrote a poem about this place. His is a billion times better than mine so I’m sharing a link to that too!

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