Kilbride Revisited Poem by Martin Moore

KILBRIDE REVISITED

What a prehistoric practice
Is burying ones dead?
Two yards down in cold wet clay.
Sealing the skeletal fractus
In coffins lined with lead
Our ancestors in mute decay
Lock the dark stone crypt
Let no light eternally shine
Retreat in deference then
Imprisoning with chiselled script
The terminal bloodline
Within this granite pen
The pomp parade, the lookers on
The characteristic flaws
Blatant false camaraderie
I sometimes visit here alone
My wife, father and father-in-law
Alien amongst its mockery
The standing stones, the epitaphs
Eerie rectangular plots
Myriad corpses lain
Numerous ancient photographs
Light grey lichen and water spots
The porous limestone stains
Decaying floral tributes
Kind word carvings etched on stone
Positioned on attended graves
The westerly wind distributes
Scattered, knocked over, windblown
In Kilbride's damp, disturbed enclave
The watching yews, scarlet eyes
Piercing through emerald green
Hard pruned this spring afresh
And gazing down from on high
Their branches a bristly baleen
They feed on recent rotting flesh
These cemetery sentinels
Have sucked the marrow dry
Gorged on the souls sacred feast
Divine banqueting tunnels
And halls now petrified
In death a final gift released
Do not bury me beneath this hallowed ground
This cursed plight
Is not for my atheist's bones
But let my sallow ashes bound
From Slievenamon's summit in flight
Or drown with the Kings water stones
I could not bear to spend
Eternity half buried
Half dead and prayed upon each year
It's impossible to transcend
Six feet and still carry
The claustrophobic nature of my fear.