Every Asylum Has a Big Back Yard

By Bonnie Schell

“Ash, ash-

you poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-“

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

Deserted halls, sunrooms and restraining walls

clawed markings on the barred window panes.

Treatment logs of insulin coma, ice baths, the spinning chair.

The nameless were dumped in the ground there.

Come clear and dig for markers.

Behind the gate, clipped lawn, multi-stories

lies the back brush of ivy, pine needles and briar.

The nameless were filed in the ground there.

Numbers one to thirty thousand etched on stick and steel

Neat rows but random spaced to dodge trees

Up and down the back hills where the air is warm and fair

The nameless were put in the ground there.

Pull up the stakes, gently stack them.

Look through records in fading cursive

for a given name and death date.

Dementia praecox, melancholia, fitful mania,

letters to husbands, locks of hair, memorabilia, still there.

A vale in Massachusetts has a hundred posts planted

one 'neath the next, frail chests with broken ribs,

skulls with holes hammered through, twisted finger joints

around a woe or powdery hankie still attached.

No wasted coffins or best dress, shirt and tie,

dust to dirt in the community’s closet of grief,

the diagnosed buried without identity.

Easy to gain permission to dig. Who would care?

It clears the land to move them. But to where?

To what national sacred spot? So many packages

families never claimed. Who explained the missing?

The Danvers State Memorial Committee has proposed

a wall of names like the black slab of Vietnam’s fallen,

but the poor envision their list on the Internet

with blocked archives of dates, places and reasons

--a world wide list of the dead from Napa, Patton, Bedlam

Moscow, Beijing, and Milledgeville, Georgia,

the largest asylum in the world where

all the suicides had heart attacks and accidents.

No hope of burial in winter, their bodies were shipped

to students in Medical Colleges who could not afford a cadaver.

Dust stirs 18 miles southeast of Sioux Falls.

The ghosts of “Idiotic Indians” return to South Dakota

to the Hiawatha Insane Asylum of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Tribal leaders ask to rebury their medicine men, trouble makers,

who resisted boundaries of reservation and boarding school.

All over the world the ones with external voices,

visions, frights, high energy, and panic are taking the bus

from shelters, their subsidized housing, and group homes

to join the digging, wind whistling through their broken teeth.

They fly on stand-by to seek their own

before the corporate geneticists land

to take DNA samples and records of family kin

researching the different, now dead aliens.

“Alas, poor Yorick.” His skull exposed. That sweet jester

had Hamlet and Horatio to remember and mourn him.

I tell you this: When the kingdom comes, as Jesus promised,

the dead in new bodies shall rise.

They’ll go with lanterns from numbered body to body to body

seeking memories of who gave them birth and sent them forth,

wrecked their car, took the family’s china, sent a love note.

Lazarus, the lepers and Yorick will have a name.

and all the millions of the abandoned insane.

The accurst ones who made an outburst

shall be re-heard again.

The last to be fair valued shall be first.

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