Blank Stones

On the backside of the graveyard, the marble headstones are blank,
waiting, it would seem, for deaths to give them life,
to write the stories others will read at times in remembrance,
at times in idle curiosity.

Your hand brushes the cold stone.
feels the long ago hewn smoothness.
What words will they carve into your own stone, you wonder?
What will they remember?

The battles? The flaws? The faith? It is a mystery to you
what matters to others, where you have carved
your truth into another’s heart, or whether
the stones are eternally blank.

About this poem

I took this picture in Stockbridge, Mass.  We were walking on the backside of a graveyard and the stones stood mysteriously empty, like ghosts waiting for a spirit. All the writing on the other side.

I knew there was a poem in this one as I took it, even if I didn’t know yet what that poem might be.

Story of my life. Seeing things with meaning, but having to wait to learn that that meaning is. Truth is a slow thing.

Tom