Oakland Cemetery: Whispers in the Garden

Lyrics

You open your gates on Oakland Avenue.
It’s not an ending.
It’s a different kind of quiet.

Eighteen-fifty.
They measured out the first plots on the hills.
Fresh earth.
They planted mayors and magnates, authors and architects.
Little stone houses for the sleeping rich.
Victorian angels, weeping into granite lace.
Lemuel Grant is here, his park just down the road.

From these eastern hills, they watched the battle rage.
July of '64.
A Sunday spectacle of smoke and cannon fire.
The city burning in the distance.
Now, the only sound is a MARTA train, a distant siren.
A quiet that cost so much to earn.

Oh, Oakland, you're a garden, not a grave.
The names are seeds planted in this red Atlanta clay.
And the wind that moves through the magnolias and the oaks...
It carries whispers.
It remembers every story that was ever told.

I walk past Margaret’s plot, so plain and square.
She rests beside a thousand others nobody knows.
Among the antique roses, their petals thin as paper skin.
Still blooming after all this time.
Bobby Jones sleeps here.
And Maynard Jackson, who remade the city they all built.

And over in Federal Square, the final truce is kept.
The blue coats and the grey coats, side by side.
The same soil holds them now, makes no distinction.
I remember the morning they took the Lion down.
Just the quiet grind of a crane in twenty-twenty.
A silence where the roar used to be.

Oh, Oakland, you're a garden, not a grave.
The names are seeds planted in this red Atlanta clay.
And the wind that moves through the magnolias and the oaks...
It carries whispers.
It remembers every story that was ever told.

The light is going now.
The greenhouse panes reflect the dying sun.
Still growing things.
Still whispering.