The Bones of Trees
The split of earth and sky blurs in greys as we tilt toward sunlight and hope. The there and back– slate-coloured, tarmac black.
Dogs pull on leads, worn red, crossing streets without caution, with panting smiles. Memorials like seeds, staked by tipping monuments not ours to keep but read.
For a dog a graveyard is a yard. How lovely to be remembered in a place like this where dogs fetch sticks for bones or leap through gaps between standing stones?
For me, a graveyard is nature’s repose. Partial, in short-form testimonies of passing lives in loud voices, whispers, sighs.
Memorials jut, growing tall in short shadows of changing seasons, from cold to warm, while trees store memories of the passing from living to lore.
Heaven comes in unexpected packages. Life is pleasure and sadness. We mourn from the day we are born, love the bloom, fear the demise – the remaining rose-hip, the browned hydrangea, the darkening of summer light. The blackbird might confuse night from day, yet still sings, trilling in canon and in time. For humans? Too many misspent rhymes. My hope and sadness dwell In the small and grand, In trees as they shift from Fulsome to bare withstanding elemental wails, Or daisies in defiance, Or...wagging tails. My dog pisses on gravestones, my guilt, my release, my laughter. No tragedy here. What was, short or long, a passing season in a charted grove, the smell of spring, the crunch of calloused snow. Still, the scope of us, our inner monument's tattoos ensue, ever-responsive to cues, we shift, and write, and move.
Dogs play as it comes and goes. within fieldstone walls, composed squares and angles against churchyards. The pealing of bells, the sense of hour on hour, the sacred in silence.
How quickly we forget the wild and rare. My dog sniffs and fetches. I admire those who knew the once flesh of soulful pursuits, now, in stone, while trees in winter? The sturdy bones.