To Where It All Began

Mother Nature has all but consumed Their little graveyard by the sea, where Sands bleached white, slide Across the cemetery floor Drifting like pale capsized hulls Floating between tablets marking The long forgotten dead It was here, fifty two years ago that I held my Grandfathers weathered hand, More so for the want of a brace Than the sympathetic touch of a Grandchild My little hand lost to the wrist, gripped By a generation lost to the elements I watched him kneeling by their angled stones Tracing their names; first his father’s father, then The mothers, with a finger crooked by age The sandstone letters crumbling in the wake of his trace Grit sifting through his heavy fingers; history, being erased Returning it back – to where it all began I followed behind his shuffling shoes Kicking up dust that settles on the bones of ghosts My Grandfather’s voice lost to an ocean breeze Is he speaking to the dead? Whilst our shadows lengthen, then dwindle into dusk I imagined, back then as I do now Of a graveyard full of pirates and thieves With their ship resting - just out there ~ At sea But for the stout chimney and hearth, beyond the grounds Baring testimony to pioneers that Once toiled this barren coast and now Standing defiant, resolute against the Advancing flotilla of sand He is buried just beyond the little graveyard My Grandfather, next to my Grandmother On his farm; or His father’s farm before that My farm now… On a hill Overlooking the sea, where it all began 8 Dec. 2014