Yizkor

'Do not write'
say names of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters;
characters of chiselled tongues.

We have come to lay a stone
over my grandfather History.

'Do not speak'
declares the stone, only:
'Remember'.

We leave that to the pebbles,
in a minyan * of stony weight,
until seasons see fit to inter them again.

Their journey of inches lends the gravity of millenia
and the incedental weight of mourning.

May is iced over
with a hint of killing winters, and,
looking uphill, I see dry stone
in walls of grey teeth.

Unmoving; merely remembering.

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* 'minyan'- the 10 men needed to hold a Jewish prayer service