The Cemetery is a reflection poem about a lesson I learned about the richest place on earth – the cemetery – made so because it is filled with the bones of people who died having never fully expressed what God put in them to do in the world. We so easily settle for the status quo and a life of safe “success.” Having had three heart attacks by age 50, I have had to wrestle with figuring out what is worth my life. This poem poem doesn’t tell where I am, but why I am where I am, doing what I’m doing.
There is a haunting beauty to the cemetery,
Among the stones and trees and grass.
Black wrought iron gates open an entire world
Of distant yet somehow treasured pasts.
A peaceful walk through the hallowed stones
May reveal the richest of connections,
Family, roots and other kinds
Of deepest relational perfections.
One can sometimes almost feel them.
Remembrance – that’s the word that echoes
Among the weather-worn, tear-stained stones.
Races run and great vict’ries won,
Recalled time and again by visitors of the bones.
There’s just something right about that. But…
I can’t but be haunted still the more
By the cemetery’s greatest wealth:
The fragmentary enterprise of once-dreaming hearts,
Whose dreams died with their earthly health.
Unfinished business, locked up glory -
Like a rose in bud form, abdicating full bloom.
Whether fear or lack or disappointment’s to blame,
The choice: poverty of soul, and a still-full womb.
What tragic buried treasure!
Greater than the fear of failure is this:
That I might make some cemetery richer,
The dream and God’s glory still shrunken within;
Nothing more than a soul’s faded picture.
Anything but that!
I refuse to die with glory yet inside
Unexpressed and locked deeply away.
God forbid that I would die
With anything to bury but remembered bones.
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