St Swithun’s Lament
I.
You stand, my constant, the bitter sweet remnants
of what it once meant to be a child; so wildly
unafraid of collapse. And at the distant altar of
Butter Cross, a musician’s cap obscures his eyes while he
prays to sandstone and granite for starry nights.
Few stop but a peach-stone boy mines his trouser pockets for
old coins and does not yet realise that this is enough.
To keep the taste of steel in cavities between sett milk teeth
long into this evening. What is art if not the craft of having
absolutely none of the answers and creating
something anyway?
II.
I buried him with stained and shattered glass by the
north wall like you’d asked all those years ago.
I must confess I’ve never much appreciated quiet or its
confrontations until I saw them written in chalk there,
upon lamenting hilltop, where I can still hear the
melody of that Pink Floyd song we listened to the first time.
Perhaps my worst kept secret is how much I love to view
this city by only looking up. An achy, sacrificial neck for
a memory of perfect Caen. The first place I loved to tears
and the only thing that is still here for me to write about
in present tense.
