This is a poem/meditation that I was prompted to write as I jogged past a graveyard in my neighborhood.
Meditation on the Trees that Inhabit Graveyards:
The Cypress, the Oak, the Yew and sometimes even the Willow are the true guardians of the dead.
They are seeded and sprouted, grown and garnered not in her shadow, but at the bosom of Death herself.
Each year without the possibility of failure or forgetfulness, for it is one of the great shames to neglect the dead, the trees bestow the dead with offerings, garnishes of flowers and seeds and leaves, which sprinkle sweetly upon their stones and puckered lips. Many a forgetful and lazy son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter may owe a debt of gratitude to the sentinels of the crypt.
What stories do the only living denizens of graveyards hold? Are the gnarled tumors on their trunks the unrequited fits of passion we leave the world still holding on to? Quests of love and hate and rage left unfinished that fragile men and women take with the to the grave, spreading their unrequited sickness into the roots of the earth, and the trees grow from love the same as they do from hate, for their nature is to receive in absolution.
How many lives are buried within the single band of a death grown Oak? Would all myriad the wooden fingers fit the wedding bands of all that are put beneath the earth, catching the broken communions that Death has hewn apart?
Would many among us be escorted down below the earth, too far and too heavy for the stretching branches, whose duty it is to reach down and pull our lighter selves from the heavy dirt and away from the earth conquering man devouring worms and fling us up into the weightless states, where one may return only as dust? Or are we, as our bodies fill the dirt, their feeding troughs, with our nutritious rot, becoming trees ourselves in small pieces, which may bring us then, as the carcass of the leaves in fall or the brittle dust of broken bark, by way of the wind up into that same stratosphere of lightness.
Are the trees wary of the caskets that we bury our dead in? Or are they happy to know that, like the bodies that they harbor, the casket too will ferment and rot and transubstantiate until they too are again reborn into a vertical existence.
The trees are many things to the dead.
They are the guardians and watchers of those who cannot see nor move to defend themselves.
They are the musical psychopomps who remind those who are now deaf to the world of words where it is that they will go.
They are the lovers to the dead and the family to those who are alone, as each box is made for only one.
And they are our undeniable future, standing without pride or derision, noble and firm in the knowledge that one day all things are humbled and that while one day a man may be laid underneath its roots to feed it and be protected in exchange, that his progeny may come and fix his axe into the trunk, fell the tree to be the bosom fellow for another at the breast of Death.
