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September 2022
Frederick Wilbur
frederickwilbur@gmail.com
Bio Note: In writing about the local Garden Club, founded in 1935, I have avoided "creative history" because the lives of the strong willed and very capable women are fascinating stories on their own. To be sure, this research based writing is something new to me. I manage to work on poetry as a diversion, as a way to recharge, among long hours battling facts.

Regifting

My father was never properly buried
	because he donated his body to science.
I did not check the box, Return of Ashes—
	not from negligence, but a defiance
of what mourning I could have done.
	Some med-student in a lab cut him apart
by the book, shucking the bones
	of muscle and squeezing the depleted heart.
Good fathers gift their sons lessons in care—
sons become fathers soon enough to share
their body language, their life after death.
	I purchase a plain plot on the graveyard’s view,
to place a cenotaph of quarried gray there
	and sign my own intent as I am inspired to do.
                        
©2022 Frederick Wilbur
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL