The Graveyard...

The whispering of the soft wind,

Was all there was to be heard,

That and the rustling of the dead leaves

Which gently stirred as it blew.

Haunting, sweet, hypnotizing

Singing a ballad from ages past,

From places now lost to man…

Tales we would never understand…

Sending a shiver down my spine…

As I stood alone in the graveyard

The night was dark… pitch black

Especially here… in this place

On a time when even the moon was gone

The only visible thing was the white of the stone.

Starkly in contrast to the black behind it,

The darkness all around it… surrounding it

It stood out on this moonless cloudy night,

When neither the stars nor the moon were there

And I, stood and stared at it,

Transfixed… in the middle of the graveyard

 The Gravestone stood gaunt and pale

In a row with so many more

It’s white texture the only thing,

That was different from the shadows all around

It was new… fresh

There were engravings on it no doubt.

The last respects of a loving family…

Showing their affections… showing their care

Capturing an entire life, in one line

And I felt the irony of it…

Standing lost in thought in a graveyard.

Some stones were new, and some old.

Some cracked and yellowed with age

Some covered with vines

All had this one thing in common…

Someone had always tried to preserve… something

Preserve a lifetime’s worth of events…

Within a single engraved line.

A line set in cold hard stone

And strangely… it had worked…

It made me wonder… here in the graveyard, all alone.

As the souls had passed away they had been alive still

In the memories of their peers, their family

But with time, even they had perished…

Like a footprint on sand, that gets blown away eventually…

The memories were lost.

But here… the one line about them remained…

A voice out of history, saying that they too had once been

Hard to hear… harder to understand…

Their voices filled this silent graveyard…

I lay down my bouquet at the foot of the stone,

And left the way I had come

The quietness now buzzing in my ears, filing my mind

I passed many more graves… all standing still

Like silent watchers from the past…

Portals to regain a time that was no more

And they all had a tale to tell… if only we would listen

The story of the one who rested below them…

But nobody now, wished to know…

Their progeny was gone… also into the void

Just the stones remained… their lives captured in them…

And so, I left the graveyard… and the sagas it recited.