Gravestones: A Series of Prose Poems
Reverend Seth Ross
By Megan Baxter

May I offer up a prayer? In the valley of bones blooms the white flower, the bell flower, the fair trumpet of the valley calling out like a siren, calling with the voice of mother, lover, all that now sleep. Bone valley, dry valley, white as December in the mountains, the way the snow lies on the corn stubble, how it folds down the winter wheat like fine linens, how it blankets like a child the hillsides, the flat open land. The dead breath beneath the earth, breath carbon, oxygen, releasing the combined chemical life of the living into the living soil. May this stillness go unbroken, may even the stones crack and fade, for the living remember only those who lived with them, those who loved them and distantly, we are a thus loved. Distantly we are thus living. Delicate strands of life and love and blood twist like a woman’s fine ribbon in the veins of the waking. In the valley of dry bones the bones sing these lines like a mantra, over and over. May I offer up a prayer? Even the hills fall in time. What splits the stone, what cracks the granite marker, what turns the tomb to topsoil, what turns the bones to dust is greater than God, God grant me forgiveness. In time, in time, in time, the world turns around again. Stilly, the valley lies, resting.