Walking on Graves

Let me walk among the graves
and read the stones, each one a story,
even the simplest with no more than a name
to mark the life buried below.

Let me walk in the shadows, to feel
the transition from warm to cold
and back. To feel the earth
spongy beneath my shoes.

Let me weep a tear for all these unknowns,
each one a life, a lover, a parent or child
with no one left alive to weep for them
or to celebrate and dance in the moonlight.

They will never taste fine wine, or aged cheese,
but somewhere, someone they loved,
someone perhaps they never touched or breathed in
their perfume, yet loved anyway

as the future, as the carrying on beyond these stones
and beyond these lives, they loved,
for that is what we love most: Hope.
The promise. The something better

that comes of moment plied upon moment,
of simple realities that grow, not gravestones,
but life, ours, and those beyond, unimagined, unseen
but no less real for that.

So let me walk. Let me hum soft hymns.
Let me dance.
And if strangers stare, stop and smile and bob your head.
They will find the truth soon enough.

About this poem.

I love old graveyards. I love thinking about the lives reflected in each grave and its headstone. And how those lives continue on in some way, no matter how long ago they breathed their last. It brings me comfort to remember death is simply a transition. I rarely dance there, but I always pray, a prayer of thankfulness, which might be as strange.

Tom