He always liked to walk among the dead—
for him it was a secret pleasure to imagine 
the lives of once breathing, thinking beings.
He would stop at each tombstone, curious
perhaps more than reverent, for he had long
known the body was just a set of clothes
the soul wears in a world where appearances
matter more it seems than what lay inside…

The old man liked to compare his years to 
those chalked on each stone, continually 
amazed that so many had died with fewer
years on their belts, so to speak—not
that he thought his 74 winters were a lot:
yet seen backwards in time, all the summers
and all the snows and all the fallings of dried
out leaves dying dressed in colors like kings,
all those memories wouldn’t fill a large
basket in that living library called memory.

There was a newish looking gravestone with
one of those weather resistant photos of a 
handsome young man who died in his 24th 
year—the old man always wondered how 
the young die—by a rare illness, or suicide,
or was he doing something he should not
have been doing, and karma took notice?

In the years practicing his little lauded hobby
the old poet found old graveyards to be best,
for old graveyards have markers of lives that 
turned to dust a long, long time ago: 100, 200
years for some-- but for the old poet it was as
though they had died yesterday, because they
were new to him, and his mind’s eye could see 
them all living life large again in their own slice
of time, in their own worlds, with beauty and
pain, with loss and joy, with grace and fear….

There were so many folks to visit: each one
whose little stone house he stopped by he
introduced himself to, said hello, wished
them well, and wondered about what sort
of life the woman who died at 36 had led,
or the really old man of 98 with the funny,
old fashioned name—did he regret missing
the century mark, the old poet wondered.

Some graves he did not like to see, for
they were the graves of babes, who 
left the world less than a year after 
they had entered it with such promise—
some died within weeks or months,
a few died the day they were born—
all spoke in stone of hearts broken,
of hope stolen, of love taken away….