Classic Poem

What if we all lay dead below;
Lay as the grass lies, cold and dead
In God's own holy shroud of snow,
With snow-white stones at foot and head,
With all earth dead and shrouded white
As clouds that cross the moon at night?

What if that infidel some night
Could then rise up and see how dead,
How wholly dead and out of sight
All things with snows sown foot and head
And lost winds wailing up and down
The emptied fields and emptied town?

I think that grand old infidel
Would rub his hands with fiendish glee,
And say, “I knew it, knew it well!
I knew that death was destiny;
I ate, I drank, I mocked at God,
Then as the grass was, and the sod.”

Ah me, the grasses and the sod,
They are my preachers. Hear them preach
When they forget the shroud, and God
Lifts up these blades of grass to teach
The resurrection! Who shall say
What infidel can speak as they?