October 2019

It is dreich. It is dark. It is Autumn Heavy clouds weigh down my spirits I am looking across the fields to the Druid circle The stones on the hill, like priests frozen in a rite There's been a change in the light Rain is etching circles in the puddles A man with a badger's head enters the cemetery He is hunched and hefty His hair is like funeral bands on his white skull His broken pronged umbrella is pressed into service Their brittle bones have lost their perfect symmetry Damp has smudged the paint in his wife's eyes She is anchored to their headstoneby private pain She is the picture of loss, in the clammy Autumn air Beechnuts in the lanes outside the walls crunch underfoot Magpies unhinge from their perches, swing free to the sky Like the ghosts of twenties flappers Plastic detritus snags on barbed wire prongs, Rattles in the wind like snapping voodoo teeth It is my son's birthday. His ashes lie with my father Near to the Mort House, fronting the rain-swept braes Here and there, a splash of withering tributes, lie on the graves Fallen leaves blow over my son's low roof That holds the aching gap of sorrowful days Nearbye a swollen stream rushes the toppled grasses to a village You dropped like a bruised apple in summer Not waiting till Autumn Left us in firesmoke in the crematorium Your childhood was sharp with thorns, Now you sleep with the lost generations Their faces melted into the loam of earth Their skins, the dung that turns the grave grass green How many lifetimes like yours, petered out too early? Here and there, a child's grave, heart-shaped stone You slipped away from the family Embedded yourselfin the stuff of memory only Do you watch and wait for us, like a faint whisper? You do not reply Not a breath, not a murmur You have spilled like water Into the ancestral bog My heart is a petrified log