In a churchyard near here, markers huddle on a hill, remembering each other —tacitly—until the stories they’d have you read fade slowly from their frames, and their dead are known to none and, like ancients, lose their names. But here, death came as one death, when all the work was done. Now their stone story rests gently on the many, now the one. As if their markers, toppled, had melded word to word; now every name, a hunter, now every date, a bird.
Published in Peninsula Poets, 2016. Reprinted here with changes.
