West Park Poem by Gert Strydom

If you visit the cemetery in West Park
and are finished with your meditation
and have laid your wreathes
and although you have nothing
to do further,
it rewards you
to walk around in the death acre.

Usually you’ll find overwhelming silence,
but at times there’s a breeze
blowing through the popular trees
and it sounds if they
and whispering to each other
and there are doves
listening in the branches.

All around you there are granite stones
in different shapes and forms,
but usually black
and some graves are older,
worse for wear,
but tragedy and the end
of human existence
are expressed everywhere.

Some texts
you cannot read anymore,
but still the message is blindly known
that people here
go to the hereafter
and a person is forced
to make reconciliation
with the end.