Ode to a Cemetery - Mike P

 Ode to a Cemetery

Far less than four score and seven years ago our Founding Fathers—Howard and Bob—brought forth on this once-toxic swampland a new community, conceived in blind profit and greed, and dedicated to the proposition that all babbling Baby Boomers are created to peacefully and safely live out their final years.

Now we are engaged in a great and sanctified civil war, testing whether the Elements can long endure. The heathen society encamped beyond the bridge atop the Tallahatchie river has engaged our brave Elements soldiers in the Battle of Beaver Creek, the Siege of Blackwood Cross, and the midnight dope-smoking raids into our holy Sculpture Park.   We have come today to dedicate a portion of this land to those who gave their lives shuffling across streets while walking their dogs. Gave their lives so other old-timers might never again be mowed down in crosswalks.   It is altogether fitting and proper that New Balance Memorial Cemetery be that place. 

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this David Weekly tract of ground. The brave residents—living and dead—have consecrated it.  The city of Arlington will take little note, nor long remember what we say here today. But it cannot forget what they did here!  It is for us the living to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us.  For those honored dead Elements residents, we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave their final step off the curb and into the path of speeding caissons, caught in the headlights of slack-jawed teens on dirt bikes, or ground into the grill of raging Dodge Rams. 

We highly resolve that that these feeble Boomers shall not have died in vain. That the Elements, under Mayor Jim Carpino and the Social Committee shall have a new birth of freedom.  And that the HOA of the residents, by the residents, for the residents, shall not perish from this 55+ community.