The First Year [All Souls' Day] by Edith Wharton

i. Here in my darkness / I lie in the depths of things, / As in a black wood whereof flowers and boughs are the roots, / And the moist-branching tendrils and ligaments, / Woven or spiralled or spreading, the roof of my head, / Blossomless, birdless, starless, skied with black earth, / A ponderous heaven.

But they forget, / Too often forget, and too soon, who above us / Brush the dead leaves from our mounds, / Scrape the moss from our names, / And feel safe, / They forget that one day in the year our earth becomes ether, / And the roots binding us loosen / As Peter's chains dropped for the Angel, / In that old story they read there; / Forget-do they seek to remember? - / That one day in the year we are with them, / Rejoin them, hear them, behold them, and walk the old ways with them- / One!