A blanket of sheer darkness spread into the heavens.
As the moon and the stars illuminated the night and whispered legends
Of the bone-chilling graveyard that's long forgotten
A swirl of biting wind
Chills me to the bones, freezes my skin
I shivered in silence; my hands were bound.
Suddenly I heard a strange and macabre sound.
A demonic laughter from the grassy path comes from a skull on the edge of the lake.
I ran away and soon found the safe path I could take.
I panted and asked, "Why did it laugh? Was it still alive?"
My mind created illusions that drive me
To near insanity, I pinched myself and brought myself back to reality.
I'm here in this mysterious place.
A once-holy graveyard that lost its grace
They say it's a den of doleful and vengeful spirits.
Roaming around, frightening every person who visits it.
Along with the bodies buried underground
The graveyard has died as the leaves from the looming trees fell and browned.
The plants are wilting.
The unclean graves are breaking.
Into millions of little stones
Tall grasses envelop us as the wind moans.
I escaped from the blades in a place that reminds me of a forest so dark and overgrown.
A trickle from the moss synchronised with my bitter and hot tears
For I saw your grave; I didn't know you left me after all these years.

I was walking in the cemetery,
a place where death sits quietly among grass, bush and trees,
where grief is softened by green,
where the living come to forget and remember.

Sunlight filtered through the leaves.
Birdsong floated, indifferent and kind.
Graves stood in silence
some proud, built with stone too heavy for the dead,
others modest, marked by trees,
their roots winding down
into stories no one tells anymore.

Most had flowers.
Bouquets like offerings,
some fresh, some already fading.
Life pretending it can outlast death.

Then I saw it
a tulip, maroon,
its head bowed, its stem bent
not plucked,
but broken while still alive.

It hadn’t been laid there in tribute.
It was growing.
Rooted.
Alive.
And dying.

It leaned on the edge of a grave
like a mourner
who had run out of words.

Its siblings stood tall beside it,
still laughing in color,
still reaching for the sky,
unaware of their fallen one
or perhaps resigned to the order of things.

There was something tragic in its solitude.
A flower that had come to give beauty
and now was dying
on dust already claimed by death.

The irony was sharp
even the beautiful who serve the dead
must die too.

And no one brings flowers
for the flower that dies.

I stood still.
The tulip did not move.
A breeze passed, but it did not rise.
Some deaths happen quietly,
with no audience,
no cry,
just a slow fading
into the soil.

And I wondered
Is this what we are?
Not stone,
not names,
but small, nameless offerings
meant to bloom once,
to bow quietly,
and to vanish
without sound
while the world keeps walking.

You do not belong to this soil,
not the way they did—
feet sinking into peat,
lungs lined with salt and prayer,
bodies turning to moss before memory.

But still, you stand here,
four generations late,
hands in your Primark pockets,
mouthing names you were never meant to carry,
even as they sit inside you,
your first name stamped with their last,
a borrowed relic you never earned.

Your brother gripped the wheel like a lifeline,
right-side driving out of Dublin,
left shoulder braced against muscle memory,
like he expected the road to turn on him.
Mom rode shotgun,
printed-out censuses fanned across her lap,
highlighted, annotated, dog-eared—
a roadmap made of the dead.

You sat in the backseat,
cheek against the window,
watching Ireland unfold in slow exhales—
stone walls dividing nothing from nothing,
a horizon stitched with ruins,
the color of a postcard left too long in the sun.

Mom recited their names like prayer beads,
rolling them through her fingers,
waiting for recognition
that did not come.

And then you were there—
the grass, damp and grasping,
twined around your ankles,
softened under your weight,
pulling you down like something remembered.

The graveyard was older than the road that brought you there.
Headstones leaned like tired men,
softened by wind, by rain,
by the weight of a hundred years unspoken.
Their names smoothed into murmurs,
the dates washed into dashes.

And at every grave,
a small stone sign,
half-buried in moss,
letters chipped but certain:
KNEEL AND PRAY.
Not a suggestion. A sentence.

You did not kneel.
You touched the name instead,
ran your fingers over the grooves,
over the letters that built you
without ever knowing you would come.

A crow clicked its beak from the low wall,
watching the three of you like it had seen this before,
like it knew how this ended.

You whispered something you could not name.
The wind took it from your mouth,
tucked it into the tall grass,
laid it at their feet.

And then you left,
but the wet earth held its claim,
clinging to your soles,
like it knew you’d be back.

This bone-tired body is a battlefield
where I keep returning
to bury the same soldier,
over and over.

His face shifts like seasons—
familiar and foreign,
the line between my lines,
fading into fable,
floating into folklore.

He’s died here a hundred times,
and I survived every one.
But I keep coming back,
thinking I might unearth
something softer.

My hands tremble from holding too much—
soliloquies, symptoms, scapegoats,
saltshakers, semicolons, starry-eyed sighs.
My knees buckle under the weight
of a history I can’t rewrite.

No matter how many poems erupt
from my shell-shock,
how many mornings I crawl from trenches,
listening to the sound of birdsong—
I always return, ***** in hand.

He stares up from the dirt,
his mouth unmoving but full of accusations.
"You never let me go,"
he whispers without sound,
"and I’ll keep rising until you do.
Don’t you get it?
You buried yourself here too."

How many deaths does it take
to make a ghost let go?
I’m running out of shovels,
but never out of wishes.

Some wounds are wars,
and some wars never surrender.
If I stop digging, will the war finally end—
or will it bloom
in the silence I leave behind?

A-walking through the foggy wood
I found a Roman urn
It marks what seems a noble grave
but its fate took a turn

It lacks a name or token word
to tell just who lies there
It blankly stares right back at me
without the slightest care

The puzzling urn says naught to me
I sit in somber peace
and then the answer falls in place:
it’s a grave for all deceased

For all the nameless of the past
the memorial stands here
The grandest grave that ever was
Unsung now sung I hear

blue bells for eyes
her name was a song
that made the graveyard hum
for the dead became flushed
her beauty reminding them of life