Sunlit afternoon, late summer…
In this earthly resting-place,
walking among death's cliches:
the broken column, solemn urn;
only sunlight - slanting through
the dim, tree-shaded alleyways,
reanimating names inscribed
on marble headstone, granite plinth,
sending surging chlorophyll
through blade and stem and crescent leaf,
lingering on tender, rosy
fingertips of eucalypts, resisted by
the dense, funebral glyphs of cypress-monoliths,
penetrating living skeletons and those long dead alike,
lengthening the horizontal axis to the vertical
as shadows run long fingers through the undulating,
unmown grasses - seems subversive
in the face of pious resignation, stasis…