Etiquette

I whisper my apologies to the dead sotto
voce, here where moss and lichens mottle
more than one child’s name. Is it common
courtesy or superstition, to ask those buried
for forgiveness as I walk on their graves? Is
it something that can be forgiven, that I find
beauty in the way the rain dissolves a death
date carved in stone, in how spores latch on
and bloom, life latticing across the markers,
dissolving all remembrance into forgetting?