Brett Rutherford

BRETT RUTHERFORD - THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD

TWO POEMS ON HART ISLAND

The potter's field cemetery for New York City is a desolate island closed to the public: Hart Island, where prisoners labor to bury the poor, the nameless, and thousands of victims of HIV/AIDs whose bodies no family would claim. This free PDF ebook presents two poems by Brett Rutherford that center on the loneliest place in New York City. From his Anniversarius cycle comes “Hart Island,” a narrative of the prisoners going about their sorry business of placing the coffins in trenches and then covering them. In 2020, the poet set out to translate and adapt a classic Spanish poem, “They Closed Her Eyes,” by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), a poet influenced by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine. Unexpectedly, Rutherford found himself gender-changing the poem to "They Closed His Eyes" and making the mourned dead one of those sent to an anonymous pit of coffins on Hart Island. At the end of his poem, Rutherford laments: “City of a billion lights, city of symphonies and towers aspiring to Promethean heights: how did a hundred thousand souls perish in our averted gaze?” This ebook is offered free on The Internet Archive.

This is the 292nd publication of The Poet's Press. 28 pages. READ AND DOWNLOAD HERE.

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Version 1.1 Updated January 13, 2026.