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Here Lyeth Ye Bodys

The dead have their own quarter, ghost space

outside old walls that are no longer there;

moraine of names, gathered, eroded, sometimes

just a stump; brief essays in anonymity.

Here Lyeth Ye Bodys; identities planed down

by weather, and some black slates set flat

as steppings for a clapper bridge, as sentry;

one’s stapled to the wall, moonscape in sandstone.

Most are Sacred to the Memory of … yet often

flaked to prepositions, or a subtracted date.

One’s cracked like a commandment tablet, a weed

arguing through the fissure. Moss fuzzes carving.

Some still shout in block capitals. Tiered marble castles,

fortifies THE EARTHLY REMAINS OF THE HONORABLE

SAMUEL WALDEGRAVE DD … FELL ASLEEP IN JESUS

1869. Remember those who have rule over you.

A brief space for so many passing, ruled

over by patched buttresses that prop the wall,

a black fence spiked to an armoury, a beech

hedge rustling like page-turning cassocked choristers.

One’s modest, a sandstone plinth with inset slate,

almost outside cathedral grounds, a body’s

length from the cobbled street: Robert Anderson

The Cumbrian Bard, poet; saluted on the edge of things.