Tim Wood
Summer 2024 | Poetry
from A Walk Through the Formerly Forbidden Hart Island Graveyards
Cindy Rodriguez, WNYC News, Oct 18, 2016
1.
There is beauty in the decay of the island.
A canopy of trees hides a church
built in the 1930s.
Its windows are shattered and its roof
has collapsed. The remains of the dead
arrive in pine boxes.
Riker’s Island inmates earn fifty cents an hour
to stack the coffins three deep inside wide
trenches dug by backhoes
(We were not allowed to interview them).
Once a trench is filled with
a hundred fifty bodies
a white post goes up. In this open field
flanked by abandoned buildings
there are rows and rows of white posts.
2.
Besides corrections staff,
the only other habitants
are wildlife,
including an osprey nest
and the deer that ate the flowers
that inmates planted.
At an open gravesite,
plywood sheets covering caskets
peeked out under fresh dirt.
3.
Someone writes the names
into logbooks by hand
and then someone transfers the names
into an electronic database.
The department of corrections says that
the city will run out of space
in roughly twenty years
and may have to start knocking down buildings
to make room for more bodies.
For now the anonymous mass
graves sit in fields
surrounded by lapping waves.
Tim Wood is the author of two books of poems. His poetry recently appears or is forthcoming in Kelp Journal’s Ocean Poetry Anthology, Eunoia, and The Iowa Review. He currently serves as the 2023-2024 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at U.C. Berkeley.