I was walking in the cemetery,
a place where death sits quietly among grass, bush and trees,
where grief is softened by green,
where the living come to forget and remember.
Sunlight filtered through the leaves.
Birdsong floated, indifferent and kind.
Graves stood in silence
some proud, built with stone too heavy for the dead,
others modest, marked by trees,
their roots winding down
into stories no one tells anymore.
Most had flowers.
Bouquets like offerings,
some fresh, some already fading.
Life pretending it can outlast death.
Then I saw it
a tulip, maroon,
its head bowed, its stem bent
not plucked,
but broken while still alive.
It hadn’t been laid there in tribute.
It was growing.
Rooted.
Alive.
And dying.
It leaned on the edge of a grave
like a mourner
who had run out of words.
Its siblings stood tall beside it,
still laughing in color,
still reaching for the sky,
unaware of their fallen one
or perhaps resigned to the order of things.
There was something tragic in its solitude.
A flower that had come to give beauty
and now was dying
on dust already claimed by death.
The irony was sharp
even the beautiful who serve the dead
must die too.
And no one brings flowers
for the flower that dies.
I stood still.
The tulip did not move.
A breeze passed, but it did not rise.
Some deaths happen quietly,
with no audience,
no cry,
just a slow fading
into the soil.
And I wondered
Is this what we are?
Not stone,
not names,
but small, nameless offerings
meant to bloom once,
to bow quietly,
and to vanish
without sound
while the world keeps walking.