Silent Stones (for Elle and Ken)

Coming upon a country cemetery  . . .

 

 

But the dead have no names, they lie so still,

And all the beautiful are blameless now.

        James Wright, “All The Beautiful Are Blameless”

 

 

Eleven, twelve stones, so old the names

Are no more legible than the language

Of lichen and moss on these tumbled rocks

That once must have been a wall where

This little hill of weeds leans into woods.

 

Once there were farms here but now

The land is healed of fences and furrows,

Broken the foundations down into itself,

Taken back all that had been taken.

 

I want to believe that somewhere still

Old photographs and loving letters

Have made better memories of them

Than this fallen and forgotten ground,

 

Though even they would have faded,

As our histories do, from story to legend

And then to myth. when even its last

Written words are gone, no one to read;

Strangers standing over silent stones.

 





Poetry by countryfog
Read 655 times
Written on 2013-07-05 at 15:34

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Elle The PoetBay support member heart!
I don't think of myself as macabre - I love the beauty that is in the lives of those gone - yes there is sadness it is a visceral sadness - the graveyard I was in (twice this week) it has such peace to it, hard to explain - yes some of the stones are broken, the grass snakes up - but it has tremendous reflection to it - A beautiful poem, so much more than my ramble - I think many of us have an almost sensory feel in these memories of the dead.

Elle
2013-07-06


Lawrence Beck The PoetBay support member heart!
Grim, but well-written, Fog. Most people completely disappear after only a generation or two. (I doubt that Facebook is going to change that.)
2013-07-06



I like the old, hidden cemeteries, woods closing in, the stones becoming moss and lichen covered, moldering, tipping, names and dates lost or nearly lost, gradually becoming covered by decades of growth. I find them a little sad, true, but somehow less, I don't know, deliberate. There is a poignancy about them.
2013-07-05