Teased out from under your skull,
sixteen centuries after it graced your hair,
like your bones, your hairpin
is white and unspeakably precious.
Fancy with filigree so artful and delicate,
it could only have been conceived in love—
as I find myself fervently hoping that you were.
Your beginnings can never be known
but your hairpin fastens for me this sweet certainty:
Before you perished in the bloom of youth,
surely you sauntered with this treasure nestled in your tresses
along this way to the water meadows,
in search of watercress and a lover’s embrace,
just as I pass this way on the same errands today.
In your small final plot these testimonials:
Someone laid you down at the last
with enough tenderness to dress your hair,
with sufficient generosity
to lay in a bowl brimming with coins
—with enough anguish
over your entry into the unknown
to place a knife in each of your hands.
—Rosemary Herbert
Rosemary Herbert’s (Website) wide-ranging writings encompass poetry, journalism, reference works, and mystery and mainstream fiction. Her books include The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, A New Omnibus of Crime, Whodunit? A Who’s Who in Crime & Mystery Writing, and Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery. She contributed author interviews to The Paris Review and Harvard Review, and has reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, and more. She served as book review editor of the Boston Herald and worked as a reference librarian at Harvard University’s Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library. She is the first prize-winner in the Dreamer’s 2024 Haiku Contest. Her poetry is published in Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and in their Poetry of the Wild Flowers anthology. Her work is also slated for inclusion in The Last Milkweed anthology, forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Her poem, “Grave Finds” stems from her experience—while working on an archeological dig in Winchester, England—uncovering the remains of a young pagan woman amidst a fourth-century, Roman-era cemetery containing more than ninety Christian burials. She resides in Akron, Ohio, where she also pursues ceramic arts.