October 2019 Poem by Sheena Blackhall

It is dreich. It is dark. It is Autumn
Heavy clouds weigh down my spirits

I am looking across the fields to the Druid circle
The stones on the hill, like priests frozen in a rite

There's been a change in the light
Rain is etching circles in the puddles

A man with a badger's head enters the cemetery
He is hunched and hefty
His hair is like funeral bands on his white skull
His broken pronged umbrella is pressed into service
Their brittle bones have lost their perfect symmetry

Damp has smudged the paint in his wife's eyes
She is anchored to their headstoneby private pain
She is the picture of loss, in the clammy Autumn air

Beechnuts in the lanes outside the walls crunch underfoot
Magpies unhinge from their perches, swing free to the sky
Like the ghosts of twenties flappers
Plastic detritus snags on barbed wire prongs,
Rattles in the wind like snapping voodoo teeth
It is my son's birthday. His ashes lie with my father
Near to the Mort House, fronting the rain-swept braes
Here and there, a splash of withering tributes, lie on the graves

Fallen leaves blow over my son's low roof
That holds the aching gap of sorrowful days
Nearbye a swollen stream rushes the toppled grasses to a village

You dropped like a bruised apple in summer
Not waiting till Autumn
Left us in firesmoke in the crematorium

Your childhood was sharp with thorns,
Now you sleep with the lost generations
Their faces melted into the loam of earth
Their skins, the dung that turns the grave grass green

How many lifetimes like yours, petered out too early?
Here and there, a child's grave, heart-shaped stone

You slipped away from the family
Embedded yourselfin the stuff of memory only
Do you watch and wait for us, like a faint whisper?

You do not reply
Not a breath, not a murmur
You have spilled like water
Into the ancestral bog
My heart is a petrified log