National Poetry Month #24

For this 24th day of National Poetry Month, I will dig into my past and pull out another original piece. I don't know if anyone remembers this news story from 2002, about the dude that ran a crematorium in Noble, Georgia. Ray Brent Marsh had stashed away literally hundreds of bodies over all the 16 acres of crematorium-owned land. He hadn't actually cremated anyone in years & had been giving families concrete dust instead of the ashes of their loved ones.

This guy was a real grade-A lowlife weirdo piece of shit nutjob. Apparently there's an independent movie from 2011 based on this story, called Sahkanaga. I haven't seen it, but I'm going to check Netflix tonight. Anyway, I wrote this poem about the tragedy when it was originally in the news 13 years ago.

MARSH LAND
by Shane McGraw

Ashes you promised,
Concrete you gave.
Furnaces dormant,
Wanting the flames of freedom.
Flesh and bones
Dumped,
Humiliated, forgotten.
Delivered from their dignity.
"You can't walk for the bodies"
The dead do not rest in Noble
At Tri-State they remain--
Defiled,
Dishonored, disrespected.
Sixteen acres of hell.
Over it all you stood,
You walked and you laughed--
Ray Brent, the Angel of Undeath,
Master of a new Georgian Holocaust.