Atop the green grassy mound,

beneath a tree-stripped-bare of leaves in its leaning putrefaction,

gray in its old age,

Sister, sister, why are you here?

You look not a thing like your old self,

nor do you sing the way my ears remember–

You are shorter now and your skin is hard,

there are cracks run about your body

and moss has clung inside your crevices;

your voice is the wind rustling through grass,

pushing through the scrape of bare twigs and branches

of the old leaning tree;

your tears come with the rain now–

were those your cries in the midst of thunder?

Your name once marked in ink on a birth document,

existed as the abstract identifier resting above your personhood,

now etched unto stone, set over a lifelong dash,

capped on either end by

your first day and your last.

You look not a thing like your old self,

but here our parents cried your name

and lamented the nature of good things in a cruel universe.

Confusion and fury in me it did awake

to look upon the new you atop a quiet hill,

to think of all the days of my life that will come to pass

as you sit there static and permanent,

to ask a question that little wants an answer:

in a world of so many sisters more deserving,

why was mine turned to a rock?