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Ruth Bidgood

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Memorials

(Cwmyoy)

So hot!  Colours are soft in haze,
long tawny grass round the tombs,
brown shoulders of boys and girls
sunning by the crooked church.
Built on tiptilted rock, it leans
every which way, buttressed,
stable after its fashion, with an air
of kindly eccentricity.

Inside, in the cool, a man
lies asleep on a pew, near
the tablet to seventeenth-century
Thomas Price, who ‘takes his nap
in our common mother’s lap’,
his dust a compatible neighbour
for the bronzed and breathing sleeper.

‘Better death than long languishing’,
says Cadogan’s motto.  Amen to that,
on this day of heat and sleep,
amen!  But after no long sickness
three small girls of one house came home
early from play.  From their black memorial
one-year-old Mary cries, ‘I was but young’,
and claims eternal rest, being too tired
too soon.
                
                The sleeping man wakes up.  Outside,
the sunbathers have gone.  A breeze mutes heat,
scampers over the graves, and starts
a susurration of grass, not unlike
whispers or stifled laughter.

Page(s) 12

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