In summer I went on holiday to the beautiful Whitby for a week with family. We had amazing weather (for England!) and after going to Whitby last year and not visiting the Abbey, we had to go and spend some time there this year. This is a poem about the mysteriousness of the Abbey.
Whitby Abbey
A stone carcass sits behind a cemetery,
like a superior grave stone, boasting.
A rotting body of broken bones,
feet without legs, no room to grow,
or pattern to fit pelvis to hips,
or mouth to tongue.
No tongue to tell what lies in this beast’s past,
his past now a supple worm, escaped
from its eroding cage,
free to roam into the unknown.
Then, a meeting of past and present,
reason in a recent room,
facts preserved like treasure in a tomb.
They read, and believe, set up their picnics,
no time to grieve.
Grass tickles legs, slips among toes,
fingers that pull it from roots and leave it to lie
and die, as they turn with a fickle smile
and look away, demise in denial,
in the in the cemetery in front of Whitby Abbey.
.
© Caitriona Hansen
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