A Misty Dawn

A Haiku Bouquet

Chris Noonan
2 min readSep 11, 2022
Photo by Adam Ling on Unsplash

Rows of chiselled names
Marking dates of birth and death
Pigeons rest in peace.

Solitary urns
Bouquets of plastic flowers
Placed to never fade.

Gilded heartfelt words
All in loving memory
For our special one.

Tokens cast in bronze
Boots, boxing gloves and a cat
Capturing their lives.

Silence cloaks the graves
As mist drifts among the stones~
Sacred thoughts abound.

Beds of green gravel
Give hope for one last voyage~
Squirrel bounces past.

© Chris Noonan

Thank you for reading. I went for an early walk before the town woke up, intending to follow the path along the allotment and then swing past the brook but a magpie drew me into the cemetery. Pigeons rested on the markers, cooing softly to themselves, and a squirrel bounced along the rows. Mist still clung in places, retreating in others.

My bench was in the Polish section, where men my age were buried shortly after the war. So many survived…

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