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Service Recalls Forgotten Dead

Diane Kruse


a high school band from Orland Park
played at the Daley Civic Center Plaza
and a person dressed as a giant toothbrush
walked among a somewhere crowd
and Rev. Nathanial Jarrett
in a silent Chicago temple
began reading names.

This was the fourth annual service of
the Memorial Ministry for Indigent Persons.
On the five lists
that Rev. Jarrett and Sr. Joan McGuire
took turns reading
were 172 names
(when no family or friends
came forward to claim the bodies
they were forwarded
to Homewood Memorial Gardens

Rev. Joseph Ledwell gets a call from the cemetery
that a truck is coming)

how many unfulfilled hopes
those names embodied; how many dreams
went awry

three of those buried in November
and three in January
remain
unidentified

after each list of names was read,
a single bell
sounded.



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