In Tiny Church Yards Poem by Matthew Martin

In Tiny Church Yards

Lichen swarm
And wait in ambush
Clinging to the rocky seas
Of cold granite centuries
Moss in matins
Hides in hollows
For a warm assembly
As cold wind
Disturbs and disassembles
The satin light
Of morning

The solitary sentry
The ewe
Steals its steady march
Marks its steady time
Arboreal intelligence
That grows too slowly
Disentwine
The tangled lives
Of long forgotten
Family trees
As roots send shoots
Reunite villagers
Laid to rest
Long ago
Their arguments
And in laws
Illegitimates
All in a line

The hugging ivy
Such a creep
Clings
To crumbling masonry
With snaking vine
And shiny shaking leaf
That hides the potted verse
With rotted skirts
Out of which
Now peep
The lines
"Mother to her sons"
And
"She only sleeps"



The elder
Who cranes
Over the blue veins
Of the churchyard wall
And throws red berries
Into the humming
Machine-gun grass
His drooping arm
That feels the distant drumming
Coming from a violent past

No nouveaux
Necropolis skyrocket
No Third Age crematorium
Where in death
We miniaturise
Sanitise
Atomise
Blend you neatly
Into the cityscape
The sky rise
Send you
Rude and ready
Engineered
Prefab
Flat-packed
Into the After World.

In tiny churchyards
We are wonderfully lost
In damp and dusty disarray
While outside
Carnival floats
Process triumvarent
As the sky explodes
To the Millennium
Firework displays.