Not I Amongst the Rows

I wrote this Poem the Fall before Fred and I married. I think I was trying to tell him I loved him so much that I trusted him to love me in life and death. I never said I wrote the most traditional Love poems....

Not I Amongst the Rows

by - Regina Holliday

They say someday they'll bury me
But I ask of he who marries me
As he still lives and surely knows
Not I amongst the rose.

Though the posey may hold sway
And roses pave the passage way
Pray don't lay me down to rest
Weighted garlands on my chest.

But if they must bequeath the dead
With leafy greens and flower beds
Well, tear mine up...hack and hack
To mulch the cactus on my back.

I guess I'm quite a rarity
Yearning now for liberty.
Formless? Not I, instead
Standing out amongst the dead.

A bridge I'd want for monument
A path to me it represents
A road to he who called me wife
The reason why I lived my life.

Plant the cactus all around
For beauty grows in arid ground
And blooms so pretty in the night
As did our love in life's twilight.

Tend my grave as though I'm there
Say sweet nothings in the air
But never pull a single weed
let them grow and let them seed.

Let nature reign the place I left
And leave no plot for the bereft
I'll have no one buried near
Except for he who was most dear.

They say someday they'll bury me
But I ask of he who marries me
As he still lives and surely knows,
Not I amongst the rows.

No green grown mediocrity
No rows of uniformity
Another daisy in another bed
Plant me not in groves of dead.

Mark me not in stone to stay
As though a fact to file away
Memory of me live or die
But far away in some mind's eye.

I have learned, no one's to blame
All the dangers of the same
I have won my sanity
But know with equal certainty

Stack me not head to toe
Ask me not to file in row
As he still lives and surely knows
Not I amongst the rose.

November 1993