Creative Non-Fiction - A Peace of Mourning

Hey, it's been....well, a while since I last posted in here - since the Poetry Challenge back in October (jeez) but as I am back into a prose creative writing module, I think I could start uploading each week's assigned piece. The focus of last week's piece was Nature Writing, and finding a small piece of nature to concentrate on. I chose a part of a nearby graveyard. I hope you like it as much as those in my class did.
(NB: This is now the updated version)

I should’ve felt some kind of emotion coming to this place, but all I felt was peace. Peace at the solitude wrapped in a white noise of bird song and the dull colourless rush of traffic. Peace beneath the blinding cold midwinter sun. Peace at the satisfying sound of my steps scraping and clicking against the stone underfoot.

Dewy grass muted those steps as I turned aside towards a small tree which appeared to be bursting from the very lungs of the grave’s occupant. In tarnished metal letters I’d find their name, how old they’d been, and who might miss them, but that didn’t matter to me as I’d cast my eyes over more personal stones enough to know what I’d see. Instead I gazed upwards towards a trunk and boughs twice as dense as expected due to a choking burden of glossy prickling holly and matt club-leaved ivy, their ropy tendons clinging with lethal tenacity to the bark. With another nip of earth-scented breeze, those boughs also became twice as vocal, their collective leaves susurrating smoothly against one another. I’d often heard such a sound in every other graveyard I had visited. Breath of the dead, perhaps?

A shiver of colour induced me to look down again to a carpet of damp fleshy leaves which had all but reburied the dead, gravestones and all, leaving just the coarse and weathered tips to protrude. I wondered whose relative had had the bright idea to sow such rampant plants. Their only charm was their tiny stems from which burst a small star of fine purplish-white petals, but even then the winter air had already robbed some of their colour, leaving them to shake their faded and downturned heads. Their act seemed as much in self-pity as in reverence of the stately crows perched atop the stones, a feeling mirrored in myself.

I felt that birds, with their free-roaming wings, were the embodiment of each individual soul interred beneath the ground, at liberty to go where they wanted but always return to this exact same place. The silhouettes of gulls ghosting and laughing overhead was rippled and reflected in the water pooled in a fallen gravestone. The distant twitter of small birds had formed a fabric of natural sound which vied for supremacy over the modern roar. By this point, the clouds were drawing nearer, trailing rain like soft grey feathers, compelling me to leave. As I did, the sound of children shouting and a dog barking somewhere echoed around me so they were shouting and barking everywhere. They were unafraid of the rain.