Gravestones: A Series of Prose Poems
A Love story in a Graveyard
By Megan Baxter

Here, the bent stones bow inward, to a family tomb marker, bigger than the rest, too solid to yield to gravity or time. All carved by one hand. All chipped from the same query. I like to sit in the middle of their prayer circle and dream of their town, of my town before it was as I know it. The silence there is beautiful. Listen to the ice shift in the reeds and the snow settle in the forest, and the metallic, falling sleet. When your bones become soil you become soil and the soil becomes you. It is that simple. In the winter the silence is more welcome, a sort of rest from the buzzing of summer, the crackling of fall, the scream that is spring. The long sight of death carries down valley. Living, we look together down river.