Cemetery, with Children

Some of these people died standing up and some were leaning. Some toddled and fell face forward in the grass. Some climbed the slope and let themselves roll down in sunlight, laughing; some died in their stone beds flushed with cyclamen or primroses. Some hunched in shadow under the dark yews while someone younger crawled to the centre of the rhododendron’s maze. And almost all of them have disappeared. The last, high on this bank under the stars, left us his sodden tennis-ball, his underclothes.