Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 3, Number 2. November 2020. ISSN: 2581-7094
Digitalis
I walk this
way most days,
enjoying the
summer symmetry
of slipping
my finger inside a foxglove,
beside the
hilly lane that leads towards the church.
Digit into
digitalis –
it seems to
prove the world lives on.
In the
churchyard,
stones flash
fictions of departed lives,
scant
records of their years on earth:
‘born’,
‘died’, ‘beloved’, ‘mother’, ‘son’.
But still
the earth remembers,
the silent earth
remembers.
Twinned
beside me in our shadows,
my
half-blind mongrel drags me to the right.
Oblivious of
history,
she pulls to
sniff the Roman wall
that lies
behind the graveyard:
a pile of rough-hewn
mouldering slabs.
They say
tin, springs, the hilltop setting
encouraged
southern legions to this spot,
but were
these warriors or just nomads,
marking
territory along the way?
Encased in
moss, these stones stay silent too,
And now my
dog pulls to the hallowed left.
Time has
been kinder to the buttressed church,
another
relic of the wrinkled years.
No Latin,
Saxon, Norman words remain,
and yet the
local limestone carries traces
of the
weathered folk that spoke these tongues,
now wedded
in shared histories of space.
If only I
could tell their stories
in a lingua
franca borrowed from the past
and answer
all the questions prompted by this earth.
Why did the
Romans leave this chosen spot?
How did the
church endure King Henry’s break with Rome?
Still other
legends loiter on this hillside.
A zealous
Simon may have died here –
one of the
twelve sent out to spread the Word.
Who was this
Simon? A rock like Simon Peter?
A passing
footnote in the storybooks of faith,
crucified
three decades after Christ?
What wandering
impulse might have brought him here?
So many
stories, so much fiction.
Only the
earth remembers,
only the
silent earth.
My eyes look
upwards to the tower,
but get
diverted to the raucous crows,
building
nests atop the churchyard trees.
I think
they’re ancient beeches,
But,
city-born, I’m far from sure.
I wonder
when their ancestors took root.
And hidden
in this town, there lies another graveyard,
a secret
site denied to prying eyes.
This
century, an inn was flattened for a carpark.
Bones rattled,
Romans were exhumed,
women and
children amid the men.
So now the
story strives to say
this was a
home to settled families,
an earlier
breed of Christians,
the
archaeologists surmise.
They’re
reinterred somewhere unknown,
lest vandals
desecrate their graves,
or magpies
come for souvenirs.
Anonymous to
history a second time:
no demon
mole will dig them up again.
I walk amid
the tombstones’ levels,
remembering
another country churchyard,
but now my
ears hear moaning noises,
an elegy intoned
for this imperilled age.
The earth
breaks silence, mumbles, grumbles,
at the
careless dieselled flotsam
that speeds
the ravages of time.
A yellow
cloud blots out the sun at noontime.
A passing
schoolboy kicks a pheasant’s corpse.
My dog
inclines her head to ask a question,
about the
odours coursing through the air.
The cartoon
bubble that appears above her head
seems to be
asking, ‘Is this right?’
She’s smelt
the evidence.
Accepting
though she is, she senses interference.
I smile and
lie to reassure her: ‘It’s all OK.
Digit into
digitalis’,
but digitalis can be toxic too.