David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.

Wednesday, 15 October 2014

Never

The other interesting feature of Warblington Church and its graveyard, apart from the presence of Rosemary Tonks, are the Watch Huts, built in 1822, for the watchmen whose grim job it was to deter graverobbers.
The poem hasn't come as easily as the lurid imaginings that inform it but it is at the very least a work in progress and it must be a good thing to have produced a poem even if it is only once in a while.


Never 

Possibly because of the churchyard’s remote location watchmen were employed to guard the churchyard and prevent the digging up and selling of the bodies of recently buried parishioners.
The Church of  St Thomas à Becket, Warblington  

The darkness is hypnotic. Every night
the atmosphere gathers desolate sounds
that might be something in the trees or yet 

could be the soft push of the resentful
spademan’s spade into soil. Without lanterns
on moonless nights, so that their distended 

shadows are not thrown across innocent
headstones, they arrive among the remnants
of silence, perhaps by water with hushed 

oarstrokes or comic, hissed admonishments.
It is the freshest flesh they come for, still
young and beautiful sometimes and haunted 

by its recent life. They curse and are cursed
by their line of work, the economics
of supply and demand that turn into 

hallucinations on the brink of no
world at all, the other side of never
and the recalcitrant glare in their eyes.