DPS: Cemeteries

For my assignment "Cemeteries" from Digital Photography School, I borrowed an idea from Tina.

My plan was to photograph any cemeteries I saw when I was out and about with my camera.

Winter Street Cemetery, Exeter, NH

I realized there are many cemeteries dotting the New Hampshire landscape.

Family cemetery along the road

I ended up taking pictures for only a few days because I didn't want to be overwhelmed by cemetery photos.

Broad Street Cemetery, Salem, MA
Founded in 1655

I was hoping to stumble across an old, abandoned cemetery in the forest. I know of two of them, but both were too difficult for me to visit during the assignment period.

Piscassic Cemetery, Newfields, NH

And finally, because I was thrilled to capture the tractor gathering hay in the distance behind this cemetery, I'll close with this poem. I promise to return to more lighthearted posts in short order!

Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982).
“New England Weather”
from Collected Poems: 1917-1982 (1985).

Hay-time when the Boston forecast
calls for haying weather, hot and fair,
Conway people stick to garden chores
and nod toward nightfall at the cemetery:

that's where Sumner Boyden's lying now
and Sumner always told the town, if Boston
promised shine you'd better count on showers
'long toward evening with your hay crop lost.

He meant, no man can tell the weather
anywhere but where he's from:
you have to have the whole of it together,
bred in your bones---the way the wind-shifts come,

how dust feels on a hayfork handle
days when there'll be thunder up for sure,
and how the swallows skim, the cattle stand,
when blue stays blue and even clover cures.

He knew the Conway signs and when the Boston
forecast didn't, team went back to stalls
and chances were, by half-past four at most
we'd hear the thunder up toward Shelburne Falls.

It wasn't luck. New England weather
breeds New Englanders: that changing sky
is part of being born and drawing breath
and dying, maybe, where you're meant to die.