Family Plot by Brendan Smith

Flowers where flowers never grow
Amid stones which mark death and dead
What a strange thing to pass by and know
I’ll be buried where my feet now tread

Coming, coming, coming
Passing the corpse of those before
Wondering, thinking, asking
Whether dirt or time, buried them more

There are those that bear my name
But I have never born theirs
Until their distant child came
More than knowledge, he now bears

An odd thing, to know your destination
Which plot you’ll fall in, like a brown leaf
And the spanning years seem small before me
If only time could be fought with grief

Some would have an army

Flowers rest where flowers never grow
And stones stand like a hand, waving
Greeting those left behind, that they know
That they know all the things which are left unsaid

There are more stones here than people I’ve known
Some names will never be said again
Some, simply there to keep a neat line
Will I become such a name then?

Death and life are equals and it does nothing to fret
Most people are just whispers
Sights and sounds people forget
But few of time are timeless
And moreso than a stone
Their lives live on forever
Their names forever known

And the acts that made them such, were not done as I am now
If I am to escape true death, this is not the way how
Your future is not decided, by the plot your children tend
But the plot of your life’s story, before you reach your end

So waste no time with worry, looking on your future tomb
Since the useless fight of death, must not be fought with gloom
Go live for life and live it well
Don’t look upon your one-day home
And make tomorrow a cell

 

Brendan Smith is a writer from Bethlehem Pennsylvania, currently studying Physics at Albright College

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s