Old Age and Innocence

The incident of the tiny grave is true. It remained decorated and cared for over the space of two years or more. I never saw the children, or indeed adult, concerned. The forceful quote in the ninth stanza is taken from my much-missed friend, Barrington Milson, whose death I elegized in a poem posted on 9 December 2016 and linked here.

   The stanzas are linked by the third line of each stanza providing the main rhyme for the following stanza. This would have left the third line of the last stanza unlinked but fortunately I was able to give it an end word the same as the main rhyme in the first stanza, so linking the end of the poem back to its beginning.

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Walking the heath in autumn, sunk in a green lane,
   Its hawthorn wallings woven with a chain
      Of clay-red berries, bright as beads,
   The noonday sky was like a grey-washed stain.

My thoughts were doleful, dreary as a widow’s weeds,

   Of aging bodies and their dribbling needs,
      But worse were furies in my mind
   Denouncing decades of self-centred deeds.

And then beneath the hedge and halfway hid behind

   Its prick-thorned branches, all with bindweed twined,
      I saw a mound of earth laid out
   With pomp as if young children had enshrined

A kitten’s bones or else the stiff and muddied clout

   Of some torn stock dove savaged by the snout
      Of fox or cat but put to rest
   By feeling hands within its last redoubt.

The grave with feathers and the woodland’s fruits was dressed,

   With bilberries and crimson haws entressed,
      Red clover heads and polished stones –
   All marking out the dead scrap’s burial chest.

What innocence, what showing forth of youngsters’ groans,

   Who took such effort over bits of bones!
      October’s gloom was lit by grace
   As if those young ones knelt and warbled nones.

Such hope! Such trust remembrance has a smiling face!

   I who am old, who walk with ragged pace,
      With chest pains and a weight of sins,
   Reluctantly must ponder time’s disgrace:

The loss of energy, the wan and trembling chins,

   Mist eyes, unhealing sores and painful shins,
      Belly and bowels always loose,
   Poor memory and limbs gone stark as pins.

And “every orifice stinks.” There dangles from a noose

   The corpse of life’s misdeeds which rots to juice,
      Accusing with its hollow glare
   My braggart three-card ways and each excuse:

Work colleagues sacrificed for triumphs thin as air;

   Home warfare wrecking trust like a smashed chair,
      Children bewailing in their rooms,
   The front door shattered as if I should care.

And always, faint, but sharper now dismissal looms,

   The scent of Presence like narcissus blooms
      Beckons the fearful to an Edge
   Then snatches them to judgement and their dooms.

There’s One who died to disinfect dank death and dredge

   A channel through its skull-infested sedge,
      Though I, mistrustful as a gull,
   Screamed in disdain and hid in sortilege.

Now, lacking leeway like a sea-thrown dismast hull

   I wallow shoreward where I’ll join that cull
      Made hallowed by that hedgerow grave
   Of bodies palsied in their final lull.

Bless those children who raised their guileless architrave,

   That creature whose flesh the soil’s liquids lave;
      Pray for the dead who sleep en plein
   And me, sin-parcelled in my earthen cave.

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© October 2014