What is the meaning of the poem "On Visiting the Site of a Slave Massacre in Opelousas" by Roger Reeves?

The poem "On Visiting the Site of a Slave Massacre in Opelousas" by Roger Reeves, from his 2013 poetry collection, King Me, is an exploration of agency, grief, and history. In unmetered but regular lines, interweaving figurative language with historical reference, this poem considers how to evaluate the life that continues even after acts of violence and atrocity. While the violence considered in the poem is connected to a single event, it raises a larger implicit question of the relationship between historical racial violence and its contemporary legacy.
The massacre named in the poem's title took place in Louisiana's St. Landry parish in 1868 and offers a terrifying glimpse into racial violence during the Reconstruction era. Within a two-week period, approximately 250 people in the parish were murdered, the vast majority of them African American. Confronting the site of the massacre, now simply a cornfield, the speaker of the poem begins with a reflection on Dr. Samuel Johnson's assertion that "Grief . . . is a species of idleness." From there, the poem proceeds to reflect less on the details of the massacre itself than on the physical space of that massacre's site today. The landscape itself is "idle," and this stillness communicates grief. The speaker describes different kinds of stasis or inactivity, each of which implies a preceding violence. Oars of beached, motionless ships are "orphaned" and the unmoving bodies of black women have been trampled by stallions (whose nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan robes resembled wedding gowns). The speaker's own act of stillness in this place, to witness and simply "mourn for what fails here," exists in an uneasy tension both with the violence of this landscape's past and Dr. Johnson's comment on the limits of such grief.
The second half of the poem focuses principally on a dead deer in a ravine and the bees who have built a hive in its corpse. The mutual ignorance of the bees toward what has happened to the animal in whose cavities they now build their homes and of the deer "unaware of the work being done in its still body" highlights the way that historical distance changes our relationship to death. The deer's death and the bees' lives, happening in the same place but at different times, together act as a metaphor for the speaker's own physical presence in a place that has seen so much death.
The poem's conclusion is emotionally complex. While the speaker states that “Mercy, yes mercy / is at the end of grief,” suggesting that some form of peace can follow a reckoning with violence, the life that continues in its wake contains a painful awareness of our own proximity to death, as seen in statements like "nothing you love will be spared." The final image of the bees, whose "needle-hung bodies" subtly evoke the hanging deaths of lynching, imagines their frantic final moments, fighting not to stay alive but "in hopes of not being / the last to die." The speaker extrapolates a paradoxical lesson from this thought, one that brings into question his own position at the historical site of a racial violence whose legacy continues to haunt the present. Invoking both grief and acceptance, stillness and escape, the speaker ends the poem by asking, "Isn't that what we pray for: misery, anywhere but here?"
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-deadliest-massacre-reconstruction-era-louisiana-180970420/