With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill <br />The crevices in grave plots' broken stones. <br />The bees renew the blossoms they destroy, <br />While in the burning air the pines rise still, <br />Commemorating long forgotten biers. <br />Their roots replace the semblance of these bones. <br /> <br />The weight of cool, of imperceptible dust <br />That came from nothing and to nothing came <br />Is light within the earth and on the air. <br />The change that so renews itself is just. <br />The enormous, sundry platitude of death <br />Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same. <br /> <br />And splayed upon the ground and through the trees <br />The mountains' shadow fills and cools the air, <br />Smoothing the shape of headstones to the earth. <br />The rhododendrons suffer with the bees <br />Whose struggles loose ripe petals to the earth, <br />The heaviest burden it shall ever bear. <br /> <br />Our hard earned knowledge fits us for such sleep. <br />Although the spring must come, it passes too <br />To form the burden suffered for what comes. <br />Whatever we would give our souls to keep <br />Is merely part of what we call the soul; <br />What we of time would threaten to undo <br /> <br />All time in its slow scrutiny has done. <br />For on the grass that starts about the feet <br />The body's shadow turns, to shape in time, <br />Soon grown preponderant with creeping shade, <br />The final shadow that is turn of earth; <br />And what seems won paid for as in defeat.<br /><br />Edgar Bowers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-mountain-cemetery/
