In the churchyard we played,
ignored the frowns of the ladies
of the Women’s Institute.
The farm laborers didn’t frown
they teased us about the stocks
near the old stone wall.
Though the shackles were all rust,
their history was kept fresh
by the teachers and the preachers
who must raise the village young.

We read the grey-green stones,
studied those not yet faded to the past
following the bones that lie beneath them.
We climbed the trees by the wall.
A horse chestnut owns my initials
carved into the topmost branches.
My claim of superior daring
and refusal to let the boys best me.

This is all bygone. Now when I return
I read white, clear-named headstones.
The village that I knew is in this ground.
The sharp-tongued schoolteacher
who softened as she read us nursery stories.
The choirmaster with a few stands of hair
that he combed so carefully to his is shiny skull.

So many graves, I spear of one, then spy another
and another, and memory climbs over memory
until my head is swimming, as though from time to time.
There’s Mrs. Gilson, who cooked our meals at school
and Mr. Morley from next door, who trembled
all his life from shock in the First World War.
Joan Brewster, the Postmaster’s daughter
dead from polio, and my cousin Alec
who survived the was in the Royal Airforce,
but died of consumption soon after.
Both of them only twenty-four.
I remember as I look at their graves
horror of their dying so young. Good people.
I was nine.

I walk under the great copper beech
where lie the generations of my forebears
and then I come to the gate that leads me out
to the fields and the Twin Ponds. But I hesitate
for a moment by a tiny grave, barely visible,
where lies the newborn son of my best friend
Of all those growing-up years. She lives
in a distant land, as I live in a distant land.
I remember us playing in that old churchyard,
she and I and our gang of friends.
The churchyard is silent now,
No children play. No laughter.

February 2002