Leave the Bones

There are ill-formed dreams on which

I can no longer stand. They have become

the wilted flowers that languish

in vases on cemetery grounds. No one waters

the flowers. The flowers are forgotten as quickly

as the ones who died. There’s no honor to be found

in death, only rest. Occasionally

I will choose to make a pillow out of the cold

granite headstone of someone I once loved.

No I don’t stop loving those who no longer live.

But love only matters to the living, the dead cannot

feel the warm embrace of love. With my head

resting against the stone, I fall into the

fleeting and illusory image of me curled up on the lap

of an ancestor. All that go before me, I count

as my ancestors because they know more than me.

They have unearthed the mystery of what lies

on the other side of death.

It is not their unfulfilled dreams for me that I hear

beating against the inside of the wooden coffins.

It’s an abusive rainstorm falling in torrential sheets

drenching me and trying to revive all the wilted flowers.

Death is just a state from which no one

ever returns. No matter how much rain falls,

it will never be enough to wash away the debris

or unearth the bones, a way to bring our dead back to us.

I have not been trying to breathe life back into

the dreams of those who died before me. But life

has a way of evolving, bringing back days and ways

that we once thought long gone. Ideas cradled in

forgotten history, but even forgotten history

fights to live. Don’t rearrange the bones. Leave

them as they lie. Leave the bones where they lie.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind