Eventually the coffin gives and the dirt comes in,
the lid collapsing under the accumulated sin
of gravity and moisture and the weight of the above,
and the body meets the soil in the final act of love
that the earth extends to everything that walked upon its face.
The nitrogen releases into the root systems of the trees,
the phosphorus migrates to the wildflowers and the bees,
the carbon cycles back into the atmosphere and falls
as rain upon the cemetery, watering the walls
of the mausoleum where more bodies wait their turn
to join the soil, to feed the fern,
to become the grass that grows above the stone
that says they lived and died and now they are alone.
But they are not alone. They are the grass.
They are the mushroom and the earthworm and the mass
of biological recycling that the planet runs,
and the dead are feeding everything that lives beneath the sun.
Return to soil, the body going back,
return to soil, the final dirt and black
of the underground where everything returns,
and the body feeds the thing that slowly burns
it back to element, to carbon, to the start.
I will be soil.
You will be soil.
We will feed the roots of something
that will never know we existed.
And that is the only immortality there is.