Week 17 – Photograph by Taz Baldwin
Thank you all once again for submitting so many thoughtful and thought provoking poems in response to a difficult subject. The winner is Poem 10, And Cross, by Andy Scotson. Congratulations to Andy. An unusually presented poem which attracted much comment from the readers, form reflecting subject matter.
In joint second place were In the Sanctuary of Silence by Janice Windle and At this very moment by Eileen Carney Hulme. Well done to Janice and Eileen.
Poem 1
Wall of Silence
Hamlet would have had a field day
Yorick and all his mates
watching the play
giving Gertrude the proper shivers.
Or a Lady M. moment
Banquo and all his mates
silently waiting for apologies.
Not a chance.
Just the long white nightie
looking ghostly on the battlements
while Hamlet goes on and on and on
in his bone-headed way.
Daphne Milne
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Poem 2
The Undying
Old bones,
Stone cold bones,
forged together in grisly fortress.
Sharp split skulls that tell a story,
Hollow eyes replete with rage,
Disparate limbs that cling together
Blood and dust cement their fate.
Morbid trophies of ancient feud
In purgatory find no peace,
Mother, father, sister, brother,
Immortalised by bloody means.
Old souls,
Stone cold souls,
Pouring through macabre walls.
Sarah Miles
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Poem 3
Severed Heads
The silence of our words,
the stillness of our faces,
cursed never to be heard
by the senses death erases.
Our one time priest, Coifi, set us here
because he did not love us and preferred half-hearted ways.
He threw his sword aside and burned our shelter, shivering with fear,
at replacing the gods of man with the man of Christian praise.
Yet our bones survived the conflagration
and we were placed within this arch, admired by every congregation.
So all who pass this door relive our past and make our present
breathing life into our still cold eyes until our gods relent.
Clint Wastling
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Poem 4
Heads Together
They’re all there
they laugh and they chatter.
The voices of the past.
Nudging their old bones
and putting they’re heads together
plotting my future and
watching over me.
Sometimes I can hear them
feel them, smell them
on a seaweed covered beach
in the morning,
in the leaves of the bonfire smoke
on an Autumn day
and in the flurry of a warm
Summer breeze.
The echoes of mirth on the wind.
Planning my next move, like it or not !
Angie Butler
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Poem 5
Memento mori
Now I don’t know what you call a memento mori,
But I can say it’s a sorry state of affairs
when your heirs
keep a bit of you back
from the stack.
Disjointed voices seek bits of themselves ‘Hey, you down there!’
Or more politely ‘Can anyone put their hand
on my left proximal phalange?’
Literally, ‘He gets
so upset’.
One ponders ‘I would rather have been a mummy,
All those tight, neat dressings
stop folk from messing
you about;
nothing drops out’.
You think? Pity those souls who thought they’de made it
to immortality and instead got a ride
to a glass case inside
a museum
where folk see ’em.
It might be eternal life,
but ‘Rest in Peace’?
I don’t think so.
It’s not much better
than resting in pieces.
Stephanie Haxton
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Poem 6
In the Sanctuary of Silence
Who stacked these relics?
Who, concerned to do a good job,
calculated, balanced, judged,
piled meticulously
the femurs, the scapulas, the tibias,
crowned the edifice with the round skulls,
filled the interstices
with vertebrae and metatarsals?
Who prepared the bones,
stripped away the minds, the lives,
the inert flesh?
Who removed their history,
cancelled their humanity?
Overhead, the builders’ own naked skulls
grin down at their handiwork.
Janice Windle
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Poem 7
In the Great Wall of Life and Death
In the walls they built skulls, shrouded in rock,
a quiet parade of what was to come.
The tourists turned back, crying macabre,
locals left smiling to breath in the day.
This walkway of death reminding of life,
celebration, not fear, cut like a knife
across faces of tourists denying
the ticking of time carved in their own walls.
Stephanie Arsoska
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Poem 8
Free Verse Ossuary
An idea: formal verse is like a wall made of bricks,
Regular, patterned, neat and expected,
Free verse is like a dry stone wall –
Still following rules, still recognisably a wall,
Still fit for purpose, but irregular, varied,
Unexpected.
This wall?
Look at how the varied stones
Lie close; each one holding another
To a promise; each one locked
To another’s pitted purpose.
Look at how neat it is.
While away where the yellow light begins,
Like mustard tanging our naïve tongues,
They cast around in fields to find what will fit
The spaces in this dry stone wall,
What will suit its irregular, unexpected purpose.
Villagers watch the burning
In the killing fields;
Soldiers go about their purpose –
The ancient, regular pattern, as expected.
Look at the bones, each one holding another
To a promise, still recognisable but dry,
Free, now, like rules made to be broken.
Look at the skulls.
Michael Docker
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Poem 9
At This Very Moment
No-one can confirm
the colour of the eyes
if the skin was pale
or the hair dark,
are they murderers
or the murdered,
voices silenced
victims
of revenge
or a grim
accident.
All we can see
is death.
If they screamed
in terror
or helplessness
no-one saved them,
ageless, unrecognised,
with no resting place.
Eileen Carney Hulme
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Poem 10
And Cross
Thewallistoppedwithskulls
rockafterrockpiledinline
nosesgone,jawdestroyed
woundontop,
alllifeextinct,meatgonefrom
thebone,
ratsgatherandfliesbuzz
deathiseverywhere.
torchflickersaswarmthapproaches
dustdisturbedastherobbers
removeeachrelicscreamsawarning
ignored
Andy Scotson
