Loudest is the graveyard’s call

On afternoons in autumn’s fall

As light between the twigs gets squeezed

Before the rising nighttime breeze

And leaves upon the walkway crawl

Or shiver ‘gainst the curbing wall.

Where monuments in rank and row

Burst from the frozen earth below

Confronting us as we stroll by

To shout : ” We’re here!. Here we lie!”

Today the dead are simply gone,

Vanished under flattened lawn

Where sod encroaches buried steles

Like proud flesh over scars that heal

And crews in jitneys putt the green

Ensuring that the place stays clean.

Not so in ancient plots – not so.

In neighborhoods, stones appear

Segregated by their years.

Beneath the lean and flinty slate,

Proud their Puritan estate,

They snub the Brownstones

Scrubbed nearly bare

By winter wind and summer wear.

Muted too the limestone towers

Pitted by the acid showers

As sometimes blank the marble face

Whose occupants leave little trace.

Granite stands storms the most,

Quarried from the Eastern Coast,

And shining as if polished shields

Catch what light the evening yields.

Yet, messages are much the same:

A start, a finish, and a name.

But ‘tween those naked, stone-cut dates

There passed the lives, the dreams, the fates

Of people past, to history born,

Now lost to time and little mourned.

Like hoary books on moldy shelves

They wait their common tales to tell

Of love and loss, of hope and grief

And that their time was all too brief.

But if the Coming ever be

When graves disgorge and souls set free

Then hills and forest ringed around

Will vibrate with their urgent sound

As all together voice their plea

In raucous, wild cacophony.

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