The Mountain Cemetery

With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill

The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.

The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,

While in the burning air the pines rise still,

Commemorating long forgotten biers.

Their roots replace the semblance of these bones.

The weight of cool, of imperceptible dust

That came from nothing and to nothing came

Is light within the earth and on the air.

The change that so renews itself is just.

The enormous, sundry platitude of death

Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same.

And splayed upon the ground and through the trees

The mountains’ shadow fills and cools the air,

Smoothing the shape of headstones to the earth.

The rhododendrons suffer with the bees

Whose struggles loose ripe petals to the earth,

The heaviest burden it shall ever bear.

Our hard earned knowledge fits us for such sleep.

Although the spring must come, it passes too

To form the burden suffered for what comes.

Whatever we would give our souls to keep

Is merely part of what we call the soul;

What we of time would threaten to undo

All time in its slow scrutiny has done.

For on the grass that starts about the feet

The body’s shadow turns, to shape in time,

Soon grown preponderant with creeping shade,

The final shadow that is turn of earth;

And what seems won paid for as in defeat.

Copyright Credit: Edgar Bowers, “The Mountain Cemetery” from Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Edgar Bowers. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Edgar Bowers.

Source: Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997)