Willow Hymn

I’ve always been drawn to cemeteries. Not in a morbid way, but in that quiet, reverent way that I am also drawn to libraries or old churches. There’s something sacred about them. The hush. The slant of sunlight through headstones. The sense that time stretches thin enough to hear the past breathe.

One day, I visited a small, overgrown graveyard on the edge of town. It wasn’t on any official map, just a place people seemed to have forgotten. But in the far corner, near a child’s crumbling headstone, stood a willow tree. Bent but not broken. Quiet, but not silent.

She didn’t weep. Not exactly. But she moved. She sounded. The wind stirred her branches in this almost ritual rhythm, and I stood there, struck by the feeling that I was witnessing a kind of hymn. Not a performance, but a presence. A song too old and too full of grief to be sung with words.

That moment stayed with me. The idea that grief doesn’t always cry out. It often hums, low and steady. That memory, like the scent of old cedar or the hush at dusk when someone speaks a name no longer spoken, became the seed of this poem.

"Willow Hymn" is about memory, but more than that, it’s about the things in nature that remember for us when we forget. It’s about the quiet sentinels that carry our stories, and how they cradle sorrow not to dwell in it, but to honor it. Like folding linens that still smell of someone gone.

When I wrote the final lines, I was thinking about legacy. Not the loud, shiny kind, but the kind that lingers in the hush between things. No matter what waits for us after this life, I hope that something, that someone, remembers me gently. Maybe even sings.

That’s what the willow does in this poem. She doesn't weep. She sings. Not out of joy, but out of care. A lullaby for the forgotten.

And I like to think that’s enough.

E. C. Mira