“When you my Friend are passing by
And this Inform
you where I ly
Remember you er’e long
must have
Like me a Mansion in the Grave”
– Tombstone of Dr. John Johnson, 33, Williamstown
A raven asked me to recall
My means to live before my fall
But turtle doves care not
to sing
Of autumn’s storage—they yearn for spring
I sought to mend, yet found my blood
Beneath this gate of oak and mud
As Mother, Father, God
and Friend
Enwraps my corpse with wounds, His end
A friend of Abram, kin to Job
Recounts redeeming fast and woe
For bores from which His pus
had gone
Now shines, the balm for which we long
This Hut of Dirt entombs my bones
Yet holds them for my hope of thrones
Abandoned now as e-
very man
Forgets himself to crown the Lamb
I wrote this poem in the fall of 2021 after cleaning graves around All Souls’ Day for a little while with friends, which was cut short by our rags decomposing into worn strips of dirty cloth. I found Dr. John Johnson’s tombstone and was so struck by his epitaph that I took pictures of it and expanded on it to create this poem that evening. (Dr. Johnson, if you’re reading this, I hope you’ll appreciate my stealing your thunder as a form of reflection on the theme wrought on your tombstone.) There are no records of him anywhere (which I could find on the Internet) except the Commonwealth’s record of his death at the age of 33 on May 8, 1782.
I don’t yearn for death. Very few people do. With this poem, I intended to help myself see death as a “gate” into something genuinely worthy of longing, a “Mansion in the Grave,” because of the bodily life, suffering, and death of the very Lamb of God. Death, that ugly dirt hut, has been remodeled by Christ the Carpenter! Even as germs and worms chew through our rotting organs, Christian death has become an invitation into a great and eternal adventure! Let us live and die with vigorous joy.
Nicolas Jay Schroeter ’22 majored in Classics and Religion with a concentration in Jewish Studies. He’s a Catholic (convert), a Texan, a vegetarian, and not a blogger. He misses yellow grass and frito chili pie. Racial reparations are necessary.