Thought for the Week: The gravestones
'The gravestones' by Elizabeth Burns was written for Lancaster Meeting's Heritage Open Day
Gathered from the grass around the Meeting house, the gravestones are laid together here, huddled close, slab against slab, face upwards, lapping up the sun and rain of so many years, covered sometimes with blown leaves or snow, their carved letters and numbers filling with moss.
Each stone is the same, telling only a name,
an age and a date. From these bare facts, stories
emerge: families who stretch through generations;
old men and women, their long good Quaker lives
lived out; and children – these ones, just on the brink
of adulthood, a place they’d never know; or these three,
who seem to be siblings, all under five;
and a baby girl just six hours old.
So many lives, reaching back into the time
when gravestones were forbidden,
or forwards into the first world war,
and then the second; lives circling one other,
like the rings inside the garden’s lime trees
or its copper beeches; lives of people
who saw these trees when they were saplings
and who may have buried round them
the mother-bulbs of the snowdrops
that spring each year from the grass.
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