id="u81063ab9-c37f-589f-a984-b656d8004317">
Entrances
That line between three worlds, past, present, future,
thins over threshold; at the breath of a door,
footsteps sharpened on stone, a gasp of stars
that fill the roof, suggest a high perspective,
that builds infinity out of the perpendicular.
Each entering brings and takes. A photo-ticket
opens the electronic apertures to icons
on thumbnail sim-cards. Once journal note or sketch
had to contain all memories and perceptions,
a passing bonnet, cliffed walls; prayerful stillness.
Still somewhere to reach out; print words on silence,
make something out of apparent nothingness,
that mental mime where bowed heads conjure prayer,
that silent mail where cards are left by candles
posted to holiness, somewhere. This space
allowing those seeking to frame their own responses:
photographer’s flash creating instant diaries,
a sanctuary pause inside the scurrying world;
some recognition, through light or space or echo
of something further, someone beckoning.
Runes
Following a flashlight, hoovering through the dark,
he found runes; twiggery, a woven stick fence,
predominantly verticals, and the odd curve
like a glance of sky between twin tower blocks,
a signed boast of sparse literacy at that time:
Dolfin wrote these runes on this stone.
Questions follow, as always when a light’s switched off,
when anyone goes down from a high discovery:
Why did this man see need to sign the cathedral?
Why do the strokes grow longer with each rune?
Did confidence master suspicion of discovery?
Why the imperative to leave a name?
And why did the later schoolboys who made their marks
at choir practice need to bring their knives?
Thomas Pattinson, living at the sign of The Bush,
Robert Horsley, probably a butcher’s boy.
Clues scribbled on scraps from eighteenth-century text books,
exercises, drawings, class-lists, found
in a fireplace unblocked two centuries later
continued that quiet ministry of cleaning, and disclosure.
Poets’ Corner
Nicholson stands sentry, head and shoulders
above us as we enter, overlooking those
who do not glance up to spot him in recess,
as hacked black, out of coal; cold stare and muttonchops.
Lower, his companion’s laid out in briefer words
than those he gathered in dialect: Robert Anderson,
the Cumbrian Bard, profiled in white marble.
Three footsteps in, floor flutters as the door opens,
a fan of light illuminates the slab
honouring Susanna Blamire, a ‘poet of humour …
who caught the authentic voice of Cumberland’.
Together these compose Poets’ Corner, a thin anthology,
more like theology where absence signals presence.
No Wordsworth, tidied away in Cockermouth,
Grasmere, Rydal. No Coleridge – missing, as usual.
No Southey, with his withered laurel of laureateship;
Tennyson and Ruskin dismissed among rejection slips.
Perhaps poets and too much certainty don’t get on?
Or perhaps, like Duffy, their language is ‘secular prayer’,
echoes and side-glances; tentative, wary of entrance?
