What the Sexton Said

By Vachel Lindsay 1879–1931 Vachel Lindsay

Your dust will be upon the wind

Within some certain years,

Though you be sealed in lead to-day

Amid the country’s tears.

When this idyllic churchyard

Becomes the heart of town,

The place to build garage or inn,

They’ll throw your tombstone down.

Your name so dim, so long outworn,

Your bones so near to earth,

Your sturdy kindred dead and gone,

How should men know your worth?

So read upon the runic moon

Man’s epitaph, deep-writ.

It says the world is one great grave.

For names it cares no whit.

It tells the folk to live in peace,

And still, in peace, to die.

At least, so speaks the moon to me,

The tombstone of the sky.

Biography

Vachel Lindsay became famous in his day as a traveling bard whose dramatic delivery in public readings helped keep appreciation for poetry as a spoken art alive in the American Midwest. With their strong rhythms rooted in the American vernacular, revival meetings, the soap box, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe and William Blake, poems such as "The Santa Fe Trail," "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight," and "The Congo" have become . . .

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