The living come with grassy tread
   To read the gravestones on the hill;
 The graveyard draws the living still,
   But never any more the dead.

The verses in it say and say:
   'The ones who living come today
 To read the stones and go away
   Tomorrow dead will come to stay.'

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
   Yet can't help marking all the time
 How no one dead will seem to come.
   What is it men are shrinking from?

It would be easy to be clever
   And tell the stones: Men hate to die
 And have stopped dying now forever.
   I think they would believe the lie.