Stone is supposed to outlast us, and that promise is what Dave Bonta's poem quietly breaks. Its opening image is a graveyard in which the guardians have fallen: "stone idols of our ancestors / lie face-down across the graves / they were made to watch over." The phrase "made to" turns their job into a sentence of forced duty. Now that the watchers have toppled, the poem asks what actually looks after the dead. Its answer is not the monument but the soil, and the title, "In Loving Memory," a stock phrase from memorials, starts to mean something stranger and more literal.
The poem is built in two unrhymed stanzas, nine lines and then seven, in free verse. Without rhyme or a fixed beat, the pacing comes from sentence length and line breaks. The first stanza unspools one long, winding sentence from "Lips worn whistle-thin" to "feathers that actually move," and the lines tumble forward on enjambment. The break after "where perhaps" is typical: the word hangs at the line's end, and the speculation is left suspended. That "perhaps" returns in the second stanza, and the repetition tells us the speaker is imagining rather than asserting.
The imagery rewards slow reading. The idols' lips are worn "whistle-thin / by the corrosive breath of engines." Breath is how a living mouth speaks, yet here it is machine exhaust that wears the stone down, so the faces are eroded by modern pollution and a stone mouth becomes a thin whistle with nothing left to say. The idols turn toward the earth for "relief," a word that makes them sound like patients. The cure the poem imagines is oddly electric: "the live wires of nematodes," the microscopic worms in the soil, might "revive them." Wire is an industrial image, but here it is turned into something living. Then comes the line I find most striking: ivy might cover the idols "with feathers that actually move." The word "actually" suggests the carved stone had feathers, perhaps wings, that only imitated life. Real leaves stirring in wind do what the sculpture never could.
The second stanza drops underground. "Only a few feet down the crowd awaits" is a plain, almost chatty sentence, and it makes the dead feel close, like a crowd just beneath our shoes. But they are "growing more anonymous by the year," losing names and bodies at once. The poem does not mourn this. It imagines the dead reaching "those winter trees / through dissolution, like stalactites." Stalactites are made of dissolved minerals slowly redeposited as solid form, so the comparison suggests that dissolving is another way of making something. The bare winter trees sit above like the dead's destination, and decay becomes a kind of travel upward.
The final sentence turns on the poem's biggest reversal. Our ancestors carved idols in a human image. Now the dead "shape the darkness / in their own image," a phrase that echoes the biblical language of being made in an image, here used for creation by the dead themselves. What they make is "a mask of dirt, / a vessel, a full breast." The list has no verbs, as if the images simply arrive. A mask is a face reduced to its outline, a vessel is a container (an urn, a body, a womb), and the last image is the most surprising. The poem ends on nourishment, with the dead becoming a source of milk and life for what grows above.
The poem matters because it changes what remembrance means. The ancestral idols stand for deliberate memory, built to last and failing, partly because of what humans have done to the air. Against them the poem sets a memory that works without anyone trying: worms, roots, ivy and water carrying the dead into living things. It is a gentle poem and also an unsentimental one, since the dead lose their names but are not lost. For a reader, the effect is to look at a cemetery differently, as a place where something is still happening beneath the stillness of the stones.