The Graveyard of Morality
Poetry & Prose by Britt Wolfe
We gather at twilight,
boots sinking into the soft earth of what used to be conscience.
The air hums with the silence of things unsaid.
It smells like smoke,
like sermons gone rancid,
like the ghost of decency clawing at its coffin.
The headstones stretch for miles.
Each one bears a familiar name.
Empathy.
Died quietly after a long illness called apathy.
Truth.
Assassinated live on air;
the footage replayed until disbelief became background noise.
Integrity.
Vanished mid-election,
survived by spin doctors and shareholders.
Compassion.
Last seen fleeing the border with a child in her arms.
Some graves are fresh,
the dirt still unsettled,
the mourners still arguing
about whether the bodies were ever real.
The ultra-righteous wander the aisles
in their Sunday best,
preaching resurrection through control.
They promise salvation,
but their god wears a flag,
their prayers sound like policy,
and their scripture is fear rewritten as faith.
They call this order.
They call this victory.
They mistake silence for peace,
obedience for virtue,
and cruelty for strength.
And still,
we remain—
the stubborn few,
the ones who remember what the world once smelled like
before it reeked of profit and panic.
We light our small, trembling candles
in this graveyard of morality.
We kneel in the dirt,
press our hands to the soil,
and swear that even buried ideals still have roots.
We whisper their names—
empathy, truth, justice, compassion—
until the ground begins to shudder.
Until the earth itself remembers
that morality was not meant to be memorialized.
It was meant to be lived.
And maybe,
some night when no one’s watching,
we’ll feel the soil breathe,
see a pale green shoot push through the dirt,
and know that decency
is trying, once again,
to rise.
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Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe
