Sarah’s grave looks new, well newer, and spreads out
to a green grass field, the unfilled spaces for future use,
to be filled in over time. Yours is further back, an older one,
the headstone weathered and worn. I come here to eat lunch
sometimes, because we used to picnic at the Chinese graveyard
in back of Mānoa Valley long ago. To picnic with the dead,
dead we didn’t even know. Why did that seem like so much
fun to us? Now it just seems sad. But maybe that’s because
the three of us can’t eat together anymore, the three of us
alive together. It’s just me. You two gone. But really, when I
come to eat here with you, I’m not sad. Sad was then.
Now is calm, now is comfort, now is bliss in this simple meal.