I linger sometimes in the columbarium of the old church abut my house.
There are some flowers there — roses and yellow things I do not know — but none alive. The breeze takes the pedals and runs.
Rain or shine, the richly cracked marble apologizes — not to me, but to the dead. To be so shamefully effaced before what remains. What is to come.
At just the right angle in the early afternoon, the sun finds the stained glass: Jesus and Pilate and Judas and Peter. It bounces off, though, unwilling to illuminate. And so there is no light left here, save for whatever I can bring.
I’m sorry, though: I’m a matchstick at most, with flickering flames, too, carried off by the breeze.
Still, in all the lost and empty — the quiet, dark, and cold — I love coming here. Solace in the stone that stays beyond our years. An effort at memory. A nod to eternity — and something better than our present state.
Reminders of wars fought, long since hushed.
