Genetic Unmarking

Beneath empty plaques and unmarked plots, the misplaced dead lie resting.

The blankness of their generic monuments a simple sleight of hand: these fragmented piles are lost, but not forgotten.

Combing through ancestral records of digital lives, vibrant patterns emerge: one daughter, arriving premature atop a secluded knoll; two lovers, wed beneath a harvest moon; three believers, reborn inside a pitted font.

These are the memories that lie buried beneath the topsoil, every unmarked plot a weathered ‘X’ that peaks vanishingly from stunted branches of ancestral foliage. An enigma interred beneath the decades; its cipher concealed in markers that cannot escape the lineage of their past.