The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
‘The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
In a Disused Graveyard by Robert Frost
Photographs of St Mary’s church and graveyard, Castlehill, County Down
The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by
The calligraphy skills of ancient Irish headstone stonemasons is sometimes astonishing and beautiful.
Lovely … we’ve moved back to Africa, and your posts and pictures take on a new piquancy and resonance …
Evocative.