Books Etched In Stone
The community cemetery adjoined
the rear fence-line of his property.
Broad, rolling green acres landscaped
with varieties of shrubbery and trees.
Monuments in lines, rows, and diagonal patterns.
Most of them simple, monolithic.
Carvings, etchings, and brief epitaphs
carved in granite or marble
The stones, like spring's green leafed
trees and fresh-cut grass, know the seasons.
They awake to the sun each dawn; grow
shadowed, docile, meditative at twilight.
Nature recycles around them by annum.
Precious stele' standing their post eternal,
while the invisible substance of air smoothes
each carving and etching ever so covertly.
Mornings he would sit, steaming coffee mug in hand,
reflecting on the tranquility of the sentinel stones.
He envisioned the markers being books
to be leafed through, revealing life
from the mundane to the ecstatic.
A few concave or convex letters and numbers
carved in stone could never convey a person's
full saga in time. The humanity of a life.
Those things their blood had seen, felt, or known.
The ranks of headstones still stand guard.
He sips hot black coffee and imagines reading
the story inside each book of stone;
opening each, as one gently peruses
the pages and content of a rare, precious book.
Books Etched in Stone
5-28-15
Free Verse
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