A tourist in a graveyard usually comes away with something: a quaint photograph, a curious name, a pleasant shiver of melancholy. Dave Bonta's five-line poem withholds all of that. It sets a visitor in front of a "little churchyard," lets the place display its attractions one by one, and ends the list on "seeing nothing."
The title does a lot of quiet work. "Cemetery tourist" casts the speaker as an outsider, someone who consumes places by looking at them. Tourism depends on sights, and the poem's last phrase suggests this particular sight cannot be had. The central idea is that death resists being turned into scenery. The visitor expects an experience and meets only boundaries and absence.
The verb at the heart of the poem is "tempt." Temptation is a strong word for a quiet churchyard, and it gives the graves a will of their own, as if they were luring the visitor in. But look at what they tempt with: "stone and gates, / old walls." Every item on the list is a barrier or a marker of enclosure. The lure is made of things designed to separate and to keep in or out. The word "little" in the first line adds to the irony. It sounds like a postcard word, affectionate and picturesque, the way a tourist might describe a village. Against it the graves feel heavier and less charming.
The grammar of the list matters just as much. The colon after "churchyard" promises an inventory, and the first items arrive as concrete nouns: stone, gates, walls. Then the pattern shifts. "And seeing nothing" is not a noun but a gerund, an action rather than an object, and the little word "and" places it on equal footing with the stone and the gates. Nothing becomes one more attraction on the list. The phrase is also ambiguous. The tourist may be seeing nothing, because there is nothing to see beyond surfaces. The walls and graves may be "seeing nothing," since the dead, and the blank old stones, have no eyes. Or the graves may be tempting the visitor with the prospect of "seeing nothing," the pull of oblivion itself. The poem never chooses, and each reading deepens the others.
The shape on the page supports this. Counting syllables, the lines run five, two, four, two, five. The poem opens out, tightens sharply at "graves tempt," widens slightly, tightens again at "old walls," and then widens to match its opening. The first and last lines are the same length and enclose the shorter ones, which feels a little like walls and gates around a plot. The brevity recalls haiku, but the poem does not follow the 5-7-5 pattern, and it has no rhyme. Its music is subtler. "Graves" and "gates" share an opening sound and a long vowel, which pairs the place of burial with the thing that closes it. The hard "t" of "tempt," "stone," "gates," and "walls" gives the middle lines a clipped, stony sound, while the soft, drifting "seeing nothing" at the end loosens it. There is no full stop after "nothing," so the poem trails off rather than concluding.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does by refusing to do more. It could have described moss, names, dates, weather, or the speaker's feelings, and it offers none of them. That bareness mirrors the experience it describes. The reader, like the tourist, is shown a few hard surfaces and a lot of white space. The poem asks what we think we are doing when we look at places of death, and whether looking can ever amount to understanding. Its answer, delivered in three words at the close, is deliberately uncomfortable. The visitor has come to see, and the place gives back only its walls and its silence.