Sanctuary. Martyn Halsall

lead stayed

      core, its power like a uranium rod,

      potential as prayer that drives plea and direction,

      drawn between blunt and point with use and sharpening.

      I imagined it pocketed, taken North in parallel

      to the masons’ track, plumb-line from Durham to Orkney

      to work the same liverish stone into cathedrals.

      My voyage was rather North-west, out of Oban,

      the pencil stowed away in a wax jacket pocket

      to copy Gaelic into a notebook, seeking

      ‘cathedral’ among words for ‘midge’ and ‘Indian takeaway’.

      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.

      Gargoyles

      The Guide’s brief mention of grotesque, a photograph

      more ink blot than detail, smudge than features,

      ‘in the corbel table supporting the nave parapet’.

      Parable by absence; the sceptic’s version

      of church history. Somewhere in the dark

      a plague face, twist of features into pain,

      caricature theology, a reversed healing,

      some mason taking the piss with a dean’s features.

      Same loss or sadness or incompleteness

      followed the day conference on war and child soldiers,

      through the distribution of clay, shade of a suntan.

      The face she made, with recesses for eyes and nose,

      lop-sided twist of smile, tendency to topple,

      could form a gargoyle in our wounded century.

      Entrances

      That line between three worlds, past, present, future,

      thins over threshold; at the breath of a door,

      footsteps sharpened on stone, a gasp of stars

      that fill the roof, suggest a high perspective,

      that builds infinity out of the perpendicular.

      Each entering brings and takes. A photo-ticket

      opens the electronic apertures to icons

      on thumbnail sim-cards. Once journal note or sketch

      had to contain all memories and perceptions,

      a passing bonnet, cliffed walls; prayerful stillness.

      Still somewhere to reach out; print words on silence,

      make something out of apparent nothingness,

      that mental mime where bowed heads conjure prayer,

      that silent mail where cards are left by candles

      posted to holiness, somewhere. This space

      allowing those seeking to frame their own responses:

      photographer’s flash creating instant diaries,

      a sanctuary pause inside the scurrying world;

      some recognition, through light or space or echo

      of something further, someone beckoning.

      Runes

      Following a flashlight, hoovering through the dark,

      he found runes; twiggery, a woven stick fence,

      predominantly verticals, and the odd curve

      like a glance of sky between twin tower blocks,

      a signed boast of sparse literacy at that time:

      Dolfin wrote these runes on this stone.

      Questions follow, as always when a light’s switched off,

      when anyone goes down from a high discovery:

      Why did this man see need to sign the cathedral?

      Why do the strokes grow longer with each rune?

      Did confidence master suspicion of discovery?

      Why the imperative to leave a name?

      And why did the later schoolboys who made their marks

      at choir practice need to bring their knives?

      Thomas Pattinson, living at the sign of The Bush,

      Robert Horsley, probably a butcher’s boy.

      Clues scribbled on scraps from eighteenth-century text books,

      exercises, drawings, class-lists, found

      in a fireplace unblocked two centuries later

      continued that quiet ministry of cleaning, and disclosure.

      Poets’ Corner

      Nicholson stands sentry, head and shoulders

      above us as we enter, overlooking those

      who do not glance up to spot him in recess,

      as hacked black, out of coal; cold stare and muttonchops.

      Lower, his companion’s laid out in briefer words

      than those he gathered in dialect: Robert Anderson,

      the Cumbrian Bard, profiled in white marble.

      Three footsteps in, floor flutters as the door opens,

      a