This poem is from my second book, Middle Distance (1989) and fits in a series of memory pieces about my years growing up in the semi-rural Dracut, Mass. The town lies just over the border from my family’s ancestral American home, Lowell, where my ancestors from Quebec arrived in 1880. About two-tenths of a mile away from my house on Hildreth St. and down a then-unpaved path, New Boston Cemetery, in what had been called New Boston Village, kept secrets of previous generations. Dracut, the only place in the U.S. with that name (from Draycott in England), drew some of the first English settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s. When the Revolution came, according to historians, the town sent more men per capita to the fight than any other Massachusetts community. Some of the old soldiers, the veterans, were laid to rest in New Boston Cemetery. On rare occasions, my friends and I would walk down the path to see the gravestones. It was a place to get out of sight and smoke cigarettes.
New Boston Cemetery
Weathered squares of slate tilted in the ground—
Shoved by drifts, or maybe mourners hammered dirt
Until the stones budged. My crew and I visited
The settlers buried by war, birthdays, colonial flu.
They were away, at the end of a slim path
Ringed by a gray rock wall and bent iron fence.
The cemetery was a peripheral place,
Like the miracle shrine with its plaster saint
Filling a glass-covered case at my school.
Bus after bus of Catholics had come to pray.
The pastor hung cast-off crutches at a side altar.
By our first grade, the polio scare had faded,
But my classmates and I drank the oral vaccine.
One limping redheaded older pal ran over us
In games of tackle-no-equipment football
At a leftover farmer’s field on Crosby Road,
And that visible evidence told much of
What we knew regarding pain and magic.
—Paul Marion (c) 1989, 2019