Gravesong (First Day of Summer)

for the ones I could not find

I stood at the grave of more than one father.

The sun hung low, swollen with knowing.

The air already thick with heat,

like something waiting to bloom or to break.

A quiet presence beside me.

The others absent —

still holding wounds sharper than stone.

I left my silence with the dead

and turned toward the hill

where my mother’s ghosts sleep.

Forty days after one death, came another.

Grandfather.

The soft pillar behind the louder men.

I used to know the place —

next to her, next to the cypress,

a rusted fence that once framed their resting.

But the last war

tore the cemetery open.

A corner bombed.

A tree felled —

it lay like a broken god across their names.

Today, the tree was gone.

The fence, too.

No sign of them.

I walked in circles,

sweating, swearing, praying,

in that quiet fever

called remembrance.

The land did not answer.

Even memory seemed afraid.

And I, a son of many ghosts,

left the graves to the sky.

To the sun.

To the first fire of summer.

But later, in the hush of evening,

I asked a question —

not with a ring,

but with a tremor of “what if.”

And he said yes.

And somewhere between

the craters and the cicadas,

a door opened.

Not out of joy alone,

but out of shelter.

Out of love that builds

even under sirens.

Out of the long dream

of somewhere else,

where cypresses stand

for peace, not mourning.