Salty Sea-doggerel

The grass is pale brown by the edge of the sea; it rustles and scrapes in the wind, brushing against the gray stones. The best stones are those nearest the water, and their words fade quickest, worn by the spray.

Far back from the water's edge, in the commoner plots, one of the stones bears a few short lines of verse.

_Ragged, tattered, nothing mattered._ _Thought of little, bones were brittle._ _Ere the dawn, my soul was gone._

A sailor is buried here; he had been old, for a man, before he died. His headstone is far back from the sea's edge, and so it too will be old, for a sailor's grave, before it is erased.