Inscription

  by Adrienne Dyane Lewis

“No one has ever proved the dead can’t read poems.”

  - Jonathan Wilks

I would like my tombstone to have a poem on it. 

His words, etched in rough granite

for all time.  I will read them

over and over.  Ethereal, I will pass

into the sense of us they carve out, settle in the essence

of who I was to him.  In this life,

I cannot begin to rest

in his expressions, let them alight my being

for too long.  I have held on to the need for concrete

assurances of fidelity, Semper Fi,

and the ways in which corporeal love chisels

the certainty of its existence.