I was at a cemetery for nuns last week, and I wrote this (admittedly overwrought) prose poem. The nuns are buried in circles around big oak trees, and it's really very moving but also pretty sad. Right along the banks of the Mississippi, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a forest of yellow and orange-tinged leaves... Here it is.

As I sit in this nuns' cemetery, I am overcome by a feeling of immense sadness--not for the lives lost, but the lives wasted. Scattered circles of decaying bones, each of which made up an entire person once upon a time--or did they?

Any living creature's two most basic instincts are to live and to create life, and these poor bones can hardly say that they did either. Passing every single day in the same routine, with the same people, reciting the same prayers, living on the charity of their fellow Catholics--did these women live life at all? Were they fulfilled? Can we even begin to understand their sense of fulfillment?

The sisters deprived themselves of the greatest physical pleasure we humans know, having promised their hearts and bodies to the Wizard of Oz. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...) And was it worth it?

I wonder what they would say now, these souls moored to trees that writhe up from the soil. Not heaven, not hell, not purgatory, just... here. In the ground. Where they've always been. Where they always were.