What is behind the closed marble door, sealed shut with moss and earth?
I read the names as I walked past, and I saw the faces of the dead.
And for most of the older ones I thought,
“It’s normal that you’re there, since you lived a long life.”
For the middle-aged,
“A pity your life was cut short, since you probably had more to give.”
For the young,
“A tragedy it is that you are here, since your life was hardly lived.”
They all lie beneath the ground or in ornate chambers for the same reason.
They stopped living.
But so strange to think that equal though they are, they are not the same.
Stranger still that their deaths mean nearly nothing to me,
but so much to a handful of others.
And yet there I contemplated the dead relatives of strangers. I wonder
what they’d have thought
of me staring at the final resting place of their father, their sister, their son.
I read the names as I walked past, and I saw the faces of the dead.
And for most of the older ones I thought,
“It’s normal that you’re there, since you lived a long life.”
For the middle-aged,
“A pity your life was cut short, since you probably had more to give.”
For the young,
“A tragedy it is that you are here, since your life was hardly lived.”
They all lie beneath the ground or in ornate chambers for the same reason.
They stopped living.
But so strange to think that equal though they are, they are not the same.
Stranger still that their deaths mean nearly nothing to me,
but so much to a handful of others.
And yet there I contemplated the dead relatives of strangers. I wonder
what they’d have thought
of me staring at the final resting place of their father, their sister, their son.