An Old Poet’s Walk Through an Old Graveyard by Nolo Segundo

He always liked to walk among the dead--

for him it was a secret pleasure to imagine

the lives of once breathing, thinking beings.

He would stop at each tombstone, curious

perhaps more than reverent, for he had long

known the body was just a set of clothes

the soul wears in a world where appearances

matter more it seems than what lay inside…



The old man liked to compare his years to

those chalked on each stone, continually

amazed that so many had died with fewer

years on their belts, so to speak—not

that he thought his 74 winters were a lot:

yet seen backwards in time, all the summers

and all the snows and all the fallings of dried

out leaves dying dressed in colors like kings,

all those memories wouldn’t fill a large

basket in that living library called memory.



There was a newish looking gravestone with

one of those weather resistant photos of a

handsome young man who died in his 24th

year—the old man always wondered how

the young die-- by a rare illness, or suicide,

or was he doing something he should not

have been doing, and karma took notice?



In the years practicing his little lauded hobby

the old poet found old graveyards to be best,

for old graveyards have markers of lives that

turned to dust a long, long time ago: 100, 200

years for some-- but for the old poet it was as

though they had died yesterday, because they

were new to him, and his mind’s eye could see

them all living life large again in their own slice

of time, in their own worlds, with beauty and

pain, with loss and joy, with grace and fear….



There were so many folks to visit: each one

whose little stone house he stopped by he

introduced himself to, said hello, wished

them well, and wondered about what sort

of life the woman who died at 36 had led,

or the really old man of 98 with the funny,

old fashioned name—did he regret missing

the century mark, the old poet wondered.



Some graves he did not like to see, for

they were the graves of babes, who

left the world less than a year after

they had entered it with such promise--

some died within weeks or months,

a few died the day they were born--

all spoke in stone of hearts broken,

of hope stolen, of love taken away…

About the Poet:

Nolo Segundo, pen name of a retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia], became a published poet in his 8th decade in over 270 literary journals in 22 countries and has 3 collections published in trade softcover: THE ENORMITY OF EXISTENCE, OF ETHER AND EARTH, and SOUL SONGS. These titles reflect awareness gained 55 years ago when he had an NDE whilst nearly drowning: that he has, he IS a consciousness predating birth and surviving death, what poets since the Psalmists and Plato have called the soul.