Slow MoverThe Root Beneath the Stone
I thought the stone was final.
I thought the name carved there
was the last word
the earth would allow.
I thought absence
had a kind of authority,
as if an empty place
could speak with the voice of God
and say,
No farther.
But last night,
beneath the monument,
something moved.
Not the dead.
Not the lost.
Not the boy exactly,
nor the song,
nor the face before sorrow
taught it its new expression.
Something thinner than memory,
but stronger than grief.
A root.
Pale as a finger
beneath the dark soil,
blindly seeking
what the heart had forgotten
how to want.
It did not knock.
It did not rise
with trumpets or thunder.
It did not roll the stone away.
It only pressed
against the underside
of what I had mistaken
for an ending.
All these years
I had been kneeling
before emptiness,
bringing flowers
to a place
that could not receive them.
But perhaps the flowers knew
what I did not.
Perhaps their stems,
cut and dying,
were still fluent
in the old language of return.
Perhaps every grief
I laid down there
became compost.
Perhaps every tear
sank farther
than my prayers.
Perhaps the thing I mourned
was not buried elsewhere
after all,
but traveling underground,
passing through houses
that no longer stand,
fields grown over
with strange weeds,
the silence after a voice
has vanished.
I wanted resurrection
to arrive upright,
whole,
recognizable.
I wanted the former self
to come walking back
wearing the same face,
carrying the same bright belief,
singing the song
exactly as it was
before the world interrupted.
But roots do not return
as branches.
Seeds do not rise
as seeds.
What comes back
comes changed,
darkened by earth,
fed by what has fallen,
tender where it once was proud.
So I will come again
to the cenotaph.
I will bring flowers.
I will kneel.
But I will listen now
not for the dead
inside the stone,
not for the old name
to answer me,
but for the small green pressure
beneath everything,
the mercy
working in secret,
the hidden life
that does not ask
whether the grave was marked correctly,
only whether there is still
somewhere in me
a little soil
left open.
The Cenotaph Triad
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John Twynam
Jon Bradley
Poetic Bipolar Mind
Sdascalo
Ton Haex
Peter Beens 
SeedMagine
