Spring 2019 was a great time in my life. One season in my life had ended painfully and this new season had brought great blessings: a new role as a project manager at my corporate job–which brought great financial increase–and a new boxing gym membership, which eventually led to transformative results that year.
Often doing my workday, I would take a second “lunch” break to clear my mind and get out of the office. To find privacy away from colleagues, I strolled a couple blocks away to my new favorite place: Historic Elmwood Cemetery.
Yes, I found peace in the cemetery.
I found out three interesting facts only this year about this cemetery: 1. It is one of the largest and oldest cemeteries in North Carolina; 2. Until 1969, Elmwood and its adjacent Pinewood Cemetery were separated by a chain-link fence to segregate its White and Black Charlotte citizens; in fact, Pinewood Cemetery was the plot where Charlotte’s Black residents were buried (read more on the City of Charlotte’s website*).
There was one tombstone in the Pinewood Cemetery plot—George Miller, a former slave—that inspired my poem, “The Grave of George Miller,” published in my latest poetry collection, Cemetery Psalms (2022).
During my daily strolls through this cemetery, I observed some of the graves, imagining the type of person buried below ground, and I even witnessed a couple grave markers that bared my surname.
My quiet time in the Elmwood and Pinewood Cemeteries was not always quiet. Located on the 700 block of West 6th Street in Uptown Charlotte, I occasionally witnessed mobile cranes generating noise just beyond the cemetery lawn. I described these occurrences in an unpublished poem:
Even the grave has no privacy.
Construction builders thrash
concrete like crashing cymbals.
The symbolism of noise upon silence.
As my job responsibilities increased, I spent less time in the cemetery. The next spring 2020, my job would relocate all its employees to our homes as COVID-19 spread throughout the United States. Although taking “breaks” while working from home was more frequent than in the office, I felt more limited.
In May 2020, I created a website through WordPress to free my soul from the increasingly burdened commitments of my job. I labeled one section of my “Poem” menu, Cemetery Psalms. Under this menu, I published four short poems written nearly a month prior, which captured the diverse emotions that I was experiencing during the first few months of 2020: themes of grief and death.
Just over one year later, I would grieve the death of my mother in July 2021.
Cemetery Psalms would become a lived experience. In the summer of 2022, as I was approaching the first-year anniversary without my mom, I was also doing something that I loved: selling copies of my first poetry collection, Bring Me Back Home, New Orleans (2020), through book signings and vendor opportunities.
Most of my poems published in Cemetery Psalms were written almost a decade prior; many of them addressed the grief that I would feel years later when my mom passed, like a premature existential grief. The title was already born inside of me: Cemetery Psalms.
In fact, only three of the eleven poems published in Cemetery Psalms — “The Grief Train,” “Grief Poem # 1,” and “Grief Shot” —were specifically conceived and written to address the different emotions that I was experiencing grieving the death of my mother during the first year without her.
Once I published Cemetery Psalms last fall 2022, a couple people who are close to me—both writers—casually asked why I decided to write and publish Cemetery Psalms. I did not have a great response besides that I wanted to have a second body of work, and this theme of grief was already in my heart as a follow-up to Bring Me Back Home, New Orleans.
Through sharing Bring Me Back Home, New Orleans with other readers for nearly three years, I recognized that losing my beloved New Orleans home to a natural disaster was a grief in itself.
So, even in the construction and release of Cemetery Psalms, I learned that a lot of my poetry was conceived in grief: the grief of losing a home and being forcibly separated from my hometown; the grief of separated family members; the grief of losing a parent; and the grief of being separated from my eternal home—heaven.
One year later, I appreciate Cemetery Psalms. Having completed two sessions of GriefShare in spring 2022 and spring 2023—a phenomenal Bible-based support group for people grieving the death of their loved ones—and through sharing my own grief journey with people outside of GriefShare, I have found refuge in my own words.
As I have witnessed others experience death in their families over the past two years, I have recognized the importance of Cemetery Psalms in that many of the poems communicate the pain, yearning, fear, and reflection that often accompany the grief journey.
So, why did I decide to write Cemetery Psalms? Because the time was necessary to share my grief journey expressed over a decade of writing, grieving, and processing, and this time was not only for me to release but for others to receive a piece of literature to understand or to feel understood and, hopefully, encouraged to endure their grief journey with faith and vulnerability.
Cemetery Psalms is available for purchase on my “Shop” page.
*NOTE: https://www.charlottenc.gov/City-Government/Departments/General-Services/Cemeteries/Elmwood