Hart Island

Amy Dupcak:

In the early days of the pandemic, fear and disbelief prevented me from getting any words on the page. Silence seemed the most appropriate response; after all, New York City had fallen eerily silent save for the seven-pm cheer and persistent sound of sirens. Then I saw an article about Hart Island. Though I grew up in the suburbs just north of the Bronx and have lived in Manhattan for over fourteen years, I’d never heard of this small speck of land with such a haunting history. And yet it wasn’t history—not anymore. Coronavirus victims were being buried there in mass graves, joining a million unfortunate souls from decades past, like those who fell prey to the AIDS epidemic. The horror of this shook me; what did it mean to be “unclaimed,” laid to rest in a mass grave with no stone that bears your name?

I wanted to convey my horror by contrasting the humanity of the deceased with the manmade satellites watching these burials from above, untouched by tragedy yet faithfully recording our collective trauma in the images captured. I wanted readers to reckon with the injustice of survival and their own mortality by posing the straightforward question, “who decides when it’s my turn?” I italicized the word “my” to center myself in this universal dread, and italicized “now” earlier (“but this is happening now”) to emphasize the fact that history had caught up to me.

While grappling with these concepts, I subconsciously referenced Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” though I didn’t realize this until a couple weeks later. She wrote, “Meanwhile the world goes on.” Yes, there is always a “meanwhile.” The world doesn’t stop turning when our individual story ends, and not knowing our future has always been an uncomfortable part of life. The “proof” is in these images, and in the awareness that we lack full control. To end my poem, I considered its opening; I’d started with the satellites looking down upon the graves and chose to end with flowers reaching back up from the dirt: a celebration of life even after death.