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DEAR ANCESTOR


Your tombstone stands among the rest; Neglected and alone.

The name and the date are chiseled out on weathered, marbled stone.

It reaches out to all who care, but it is too late to mourn.

You did not know that I exist. You died and I was born.

Yet each of us are cells of you, in flesh, in blood, in bone.

Our blood contracts and beats a pulse entirely not our own.

Dear ancestor, the place you filled one hundred years ago,

spreads out among the ones you left who would have loved you so.

I wonder if you lived and loved, I wonder if you knew,

that someday I would find this spot; and come to visit you.

Walter Butler Palmer