#tellthetrees

There is an irrevocable sadness to estate sales and cemeteries.

Difficult to describe, impossible to ignore.

One of my favorite people, @alli-hallows-eve, says "In the end your life will be summed up as a dash between two dates", and in a place like Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa, OK that is heavy.

Oaklawn Cemetery holds shadows beyond what’s visible. All the marked graves are white, from Tulsa’s segregated past. But in 2020–2021, mass grave excavations here began connecting Oaklawn to the city’s most violent wound — the 1921 Race Massacre. I can’t speak for that history, but I can name that this ground is layered with truths not written on the stones. For more information please read Scott Ellsworth's excellent book, "Death in a Promised Land".

What I will do is share my observations, experiences, and research from my personal exploration of this cemetery and the Tulsa Library archives. This will be a slice of life journey, not rigorous academia.

While we're posting poetry..... I found this Charles de Lint inspired piece from 2017 buried in my notes app.

Nature, death, and mysticism wound as tightly as the ivy this covering tree, which covers these graves.......

Cemeteries are already a liminal space, both set out of time, and deeply held in time's clutch. The fairy circle was a appreciated warning not to trespass too far.

The graves buried in overgrowth, however, stopped me in my tracks. This is a well maintained cemetery just East of the downtown area. Graves here are groomed, the grounds are golf course level pristine.... This. Does. Not. Happen. Yet here we are....... a brambled thicket of pine, poke, and ivy consumed these two graves.

I have not yet researched these individuals, but after leaving the cemetery I went to the Tulsa Library's archives to research this cemetery. There isn't any sugarcoating or avoiding it......this cemetery was segregated. The marked* graves here from before 1969 were white. Intentionally, disturbingly so.

I researched these plants, Cunningham says:

Pine for protection, longevity, warding.

Ivy/vines for immortality, persistence, fidelity.

Poke weed for hex-breaking, courage, and danger.

I am not yet wise enough to interpret what they mean together, over a grave..... And so I left the grave as I found it, tangled in pine and ivy, crowned with poke and shadowed by a circle of mushrooms I dared not cross. What does it mean, when memory, history, and folklore overlap in a single place? Perhaps it means we are never standing only on grass and stone—we are always standing in a threshold.