Church on a Nice Day
The sky is endless; cerulean blue.
The lawn smells like sweet grass and rotted mildew.
Nearby drifts the whistle of a sparrow,
The steeple bell tolls with Gregorian sorrow.
Wind rustles through leaves of overgrown brush
Chaotically flickering with a quiet hush.
A church watches over an old cemetery;
Muted beige stones wrapped in ivy and berry,
Randomly scattered, bricks orderly formed;
A cross like the one your grandmother wore.
Baroque stained windows with colors gone soft,
Are black from daylight like a sign that’s turned off.
The breeze blows with coolness but the sun is still warm.
A bee with no stinger flies with no swarm.
Medieval style thatches are surrounding the bend,
With pink rose petals and green thorny stems.
Aged tombstones gather in uneven rows,
In patches of weed where sunflower grows.
Be-speckled in sunlight and draped by trees,
Fragments of shadows are dancing like leaves.
The tombs are erased but some marks remain,
An oval-shaped border drawn like a frame.
A human design etched with human care,
A reminder that something, at one point, was there.
The rest; grey slabs with lichen and lyme
Eternally eroded by the waves of time.
From the soil grow trees with infinite limbs,
Donning saggy pined beards with ancient wisdom.
Branches with pockets where local birds perch,
The trees are now taller than the neighboring church.
To your right, nestled in moss, with the weight of lead,
There’s an unmarked tomb; a child’s bed.
Fully ensconced by the arms of an oak,
The branches hover over like an ancestor’s cloak.
With the cooing of a dove and squalls of a gull flying,
The birds sound somewhere between singing and crying.