The Graveyard of Muchness
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There is a graveyard where wonder is buried.
No one speaks its name aloud,
but every soul finds its way there eventually—
pulled by the hush of expectation,
the quiet insistence to become
less radiant,
less reckless,
less much.
Mist gathers over the headstones,
soft as resignation.
The air tastes of unspilled laughter,
of colours muted into manners.
You can hear the faint weeping of what was once possible—
childhood’s bright defiance,
adolescence’s uncontained blaze—
now reduced to ghosts,
hovering in the fog
like half-remembered songs.
Each grave is marked
not by name,
but by apology.
Here lies the girl who laughed too loudly.
Here lies the boy who cried too easily.
Here lies the dreamer who believed the world could be kind.
The path winds through marble angels
with clipped wings,
their faces eroded by the weather of conformity.
Somewhere beneath your feet,
your own laughter stirs,
turning in its sleep.
You stop beside a small grave
and recognize the engraving—
the curve of your own handwriting.
You kneel, trembling,
brush the moss away,
and find the words:
She learned to be appropriate.
The realization is unbearable.
That you buried yourself to be loved.
That the world prefers the echo to the voice.
That every time you called it growing up,
you meant shrinking down.
In the distance,
a bell tolls softly—
mourning or invitation,
you can’t be sure.
The fog curls tighter around your ankles,
and for a heartbeat,
you think you hear laughter—
your laughter—
rising through the soil,
wild and unrepentant.
It sounds like resurrection.
It sounds like home.
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