The strange church smelled a big 'high', of censers and polish. The strange curate was just as appropriate: the took off into the marriage-service. No-one cared to challenge that gambit.

Then he dimissed you, and the rest of us followed, sheepish next-of-kin, to the place without the walls: spoil-heaps of chrysanths dead in their plastic macs, eldorado of washtand-marble.

Embarrassed, we dismissed ourselves: the three mute great-aunts borne away down St Chad's Garth in a stiff-backed Edwardian Rolls.

I unburden the saga of your burial, my dear. You had lived enough to see things 'nicely settled'.

 

Geoffrey Hill

 

THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING

The ratio of daylight to handwriting

Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.

The paper was so thin it skinned air.

The hand was fire and the page tinder.

Everything burned away except the one

Place they singled out between fingers

Held over a letter pad they set aside

For the long evenings of their leave-takings,

Always asking after what they kept losing,

Always performing - even when a shadow

Fell across the page and they knew the answer

Was not forthcoming - the same action:

First the leaning down, the pen becoming

A staff to walk fields with as they vanished

Underfoot into memory. Then the letting up,

The lighter stroke, which brought back

Cranesbill and thistle, a bicycle wheel

Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass

Again and the hedges veiled in hawthorn

Again just in time for the May Novenas

Recited in sweet air on a road leading

To another road, then another one, widening

To a motorway with four lanes, ending in

A new town on the edge of a city

They will never see. And if we say

An art is lost when it no longer knows

How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see

The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,

Going downstairs so as not to listen to

The fields stirring at night as they became

Memory and in the morning as they became

Ink; what we did so as not to hear them

Whispering the only question they knew

By heart, the only one they learned from all

Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,

How to ask: is it still there?

- Eavan Boland

FROM SUNSET TO STAR RISE

Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:
     I am no summer friend, but wintry cold,
     A silly sheep benighted from the fold,
A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.
Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot,
     Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold;
     Lest you with me should shiver on the wold,
Athirst and hungering on a barren spot.
For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
     I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes when a wind sighs through the sedge
     Ghosts of my buried years and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
     On sometime summer's unreturning track.

- Christina Rossetti

THE ROE DEER

We must anticipate the dawn one day,
Crossing the long field silently to see
The roe deer feed. Should there be snow this year
Taking their tracks, searching our colours out,
The dusk may help us to forestall their doubt
And drink the quiet of their secrecy
Before, the first light lengthening, they are gone.
One day we must anticipate the dawn.

- Charles Tomlinson

JOHN HEWITT

 Sports jacket, corduroys, red tie.
A voice in Belfast middle-class
Proclaims the Marxist line of '38.
A plump young man, moustached,
Defines the issue of the time.

'Some want conscription' - pause -
'But others are of military age.'
'Who's that?' I ask. Boyd whispers:
'Another John - surname's Hewitt.'

I'll pass him on Stranmillis Road.
'Hello,' he'll say, abrupt and shy,
Museum man not yet in coventry.
One day he bids me call him John,
Asks me to his Mount Charles flat.

He's not a man who seeks
Confessions, drunk alliances,
The praise of coteries,
lounge bar politics.

We rarely write or phone
To bridge the Irish Sea.
He and McFadden tried to break
The mould of bigotry.
Last met in '84, John bearded,
Frail, eye-troubled, stick in hand,
Snug in the Châlet d'or.
We chat of friends, our craft,
The temper of the local streets.

Talk done, I watch him walk away,
Admire his stubborn gait.

- Robert Greacen .

SHOW BAN FOR PEKE BREEDER'S CONTEMPT

 (A McGonagall Sonnet based on a Guardian report 4 June 1985)

A wee ban has been placed, by the Kennel Club General Committee,
on Mrs Barbara Lashmar, aged 63, of Redhill, Surrey,
because she "discredited the canine world." They showed
no pity -
she's banned from all dog shows for ten years because in a flurry
of temper she told how Miss Adele Summers (who fled from the
judging ring in tears
with her dog "Modesty Permits") had slept with gay or
stud judges.
She said Miss Summers' dog was an effing cripple, and (it
appears)
she shouted out, without any winks or nudges:
"Anybody who gives that dog a ticket is an effing crook!"
Miss Summers was very embarrassed and asked if she had to stay.
Mrs Lashmar was calling the other breeders every name in the book.
She shouted loud: "Good. You're an effing big-head anyway!"
as Miss Summers went. Major General Martin Sinall,
Kennel Club Secretary, added an afterthought:
"We regard ourselves very much the gentle end of sport."

- Gavin Ewart

AUNT TILLIE

When mother went away
You took her place. 
You showed me how
 To pull my socks on 
Master the alphabet 
Spell words like"icicle."
You told me wonder tales -
Jack the Giant Killer 
The Three Bears.
You bandaged my cut knees
Bought me a Raleigh bike.
A Coventry thoroughbred.
Saw I was schooled
Took on my feckless Dad.
I veered from policies
That you endorsed
But kept your moral stance
As best I could.
I travel the road
Through the dead years
Back to your love.

- Robert Greacen