🌙 Introduction:

Some poems are not written for applause, but for absolution.
This piece is a quiet communion between who I was and who I’ve become—a candlelit conversation beside the grave of a name I no longer wear.

Epistle to the Name They Buried isn’t just mourning—it’s reverence, rebellion, and the strange tenderness of speaking to your own epitaph. It belongs to those of us who had to die in one skin to keep living in another.

A confessional, gothic prayer carved in ink and bone.

“Epistle to the Name They Buried” 
Poetry by Rowan Evans  
 
I come here sometimes, 
to sit by your stone and speak 
of what we’ve written— 
how the ink clots differently now, 
how our verses bleed slower, 
but deeper. 
 
The air tastes of iron and rain-rotted leaves, 
sweetness gone septic by memory’s rust. 
Moss clings to angel wings cracked by seasons, 
and candle wax congeals like old scars 
around the base of your headstone. 
 
It feels strange to call it my journey— 
I slip, name it ours, 
because you were there in every stanza 
before breath believed it meant living. 
We kept each other alive, didn’t we? 
Or at least, we tried. 
 
The ravens have grown used to us; 
they watch from leaning crosses, 
black eyes reflecting a sky too tired to weep. 
Marble chills my bones 
even through the futile armor of my coat, 
and somewhere between your silence 
and my confession, 
the wind drags secrets through the brittle grass. 
 
I tell you of the poems that found breath, 
the ones that died in drafts, 
the nights the pen trembled 
with something close to resurrection. 
Of hands ink-stained and shaking, 
whispering prayers to gods 
I no longer believe in— 
yet still feel breathing in the margins. 
 
And at last, I look down: 
see the name carved deep in stone, 
letters heavy as bone dust, 
foreign on my tongue now, 
wrong in a way the earth itself seems to know. 
 
It’s my grave I’ve been speaking to, 
but not the me I chose— 
a monument to the son they mourned, 
while I, reborn in ink and ruin, 
keep breathing just beyond the epitaph.

🕯 Closing Reflection:

We often imagine rebirth as triumphant, but sometimes it feels like sitting in the rain, whispering to a name that still echoes in family tombstones and dusty memories.
And yet—even here, in the quiet decay—there’s a strange, stubborn grace: the knowledge that what was buried wasn’t the end, but the beginning of something truer.

Thank you for bearing witness to this epistle.
If it resonates—know that you, too, are allowed to speak back to the name they buried. And to keep breathing beyond your own epitaph.

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