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.