Sunday, 26 October 2014

Never (again)

Retrieving a failed poem is never easy and sometimes just not on. I am persevering with Never, however, and have even edited one of the photographs to make it look like night or, more accurately a daytime photo with the exposure adjusted.
I liked 'on the brink of no world at all' but then realized that 'brink' was in another quite recent poem and one can't be using the same words all the time.



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
gathers desolate sounds one might not hear
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 impassive
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 edge of no
world at all, the other side of never
and memories of murder  in their eyes.