I would like to leave you to bury each other,
but you won’t. You keep rising
out of the falling dust, refusing
to lie still long enough to smother.

You throw down in transparent disgust
the tools of your unwilling trade
and dice like strikers, while the spade
and barrow blush in the creep of rust.

Everything’s now at sixes and sevens,
long overdue for traditional rites;
striped awnings flap over your gravesites,
Hell gapes, and the overclouded heavens

threaten rain. We, your living,
demand fulfillment of this last
obligation. Lay one another to rest
and we will grieve. I will go on grieving.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds (2010)
Accents Publishing

J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).