Oakland Cemetery: Whispers in the Garden

Lyrics

The iron of the East Gate is cool on my hand.
Just for a moment.
I breathe out the city.
Breathe in the quiet.

You began in eighteen-fifty.
Six acres of red clay, a promise of future shade.
The first name you learned was Dr. James Nissen,
a fresh page in a new ledger, the first line written in soil.
Before the city had parks, it had you.
Families came for picnics then, I'm told.
Laughed on blankets spread over a future sorrow,
unaware of the roots reaching for their feet.

This is more than a garden of stone.
It's an arboretum where stories are sown.
The largest magnolias in Georgia hold court,
breathing out history, sweet and old.
These aren't whispers from ghosts in between.
These are the whispers of green.

I trace the path past the ornate Victorians.
Past angel wings chipped by a century of acid rain.
I pass Margaret Mitchell, sleeping under her simple family stone,
a world away from Tara's drama.
And then the Lion of Atlanta, weeping in granite for its lost cause.
And just beyond, Potter's Field.
Where names are worn away by the wind,
or were never carved at all.
You hold them all the same. The celebrated and the unseen.

This is more than a garden of stone.
It's an arboretum where stories are sown.
The largest magnolias in Georgia hold court,
breathing out history, sweet and old.
These aren't whispers from ghosts in between.
These are the whispers of green.

And now I hear a new sound in the stillness.
A low, industrious hum from the apiary hives.
The bees don't read the dates carved on a marker.
They just see forty-eight acres of blossoms.
A city of pollen and purpose.
They are making something sweet from all this silence.
A quiet, golden, insistent life.

From six acres to forty-eight.
A library of roots and names.
You hold them all.
And you are still growing.
Still breathing.
Whispering green.