Books Etched In Stone

The community cemetery adjoined the rear fence-line of his property. Broad, rolling green acres landscaped with varieties of shrubbery and trees. Monuments in lines, rows, and diagonal patterns. Most of them simple, monolithic. Carvings, etchings, and brief epitaphs carved in granite or marble The stones, like spring's green leafed trees and fresh-cut grass, know the seasons. They awake to the sun each dawn; grow shadowed, docile, meditative at twilight. Nature recycles around them by annum. Precious stele' standing their post eternal, while the invisible substance of air smoothes each carving and etching ever so covertly. Mornings he would sit, steaming coffee mug in hand, reflecting on the tranquility of the sentinel stones. He envisioned the markers being books to be leafed through, revealing life from the mundane to the ecstatic. A few concave or convex letters and numbers carved in stone could never convey a person's full saga in time. The humanity of a life. Those things their blood had seen, felt, or known. The ranks of headstones still stand guard. He sips hot black coffee and imagines reading the story inside each book of stone; opening each, as one gently peruses the pages and content of a rare, precious book. Books Etched in Stone 5-28-15 Free Verse