On a day where many eyes are focused on a funeral in Rome, I realise that this week I have not been able to attend all the funerals I would have wanted to. In the course of that I have made multiple visits to Roselawn Crematorium (still the only human crematorium in Northern Ireland), two on one day, but I haven't been conducting any of the services, perhaps affording me more time to look at and think about an all-to-familiar environment. The day I was there for 2 committals was a grey, mizzly day, with only the most gentle of breezes, and as I sat in the carpark between the two services I was struck by the fact that the crematorium building is increasingly surrounded by a perimeter of memorial trees, which wasn't true when I first started coming here at the beginning of my ministry. Most of them are deciduous, which is an interesting choice rather than the evergreens, like yew, with their eternal symbolism, that you often find predominating in traditional graveyards, and most of those are silver birch. The following piece started percolating in my head, but, as I posted that evening on social media, I went home and happened to read Gillian Clarke's poem "The Year's Midnight" in Janet Morley's seasonal anthology "Haphazard by Midnight". It draws on similar themes to what follows, but is perhaps more pertinent for the turning of the year, although it was doubtless written with St. Lucy's Day (or the Winter Solstice) in mind, given that the title is probably drawn from Donne's "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day". But that's the great thing about poetry, the words and images in one poem reshape how we see and think about the world around us and recrystalise in different forms, inspiring other poems and paintings and creative engagement with the world. They too "bequeath us our breath."
Serried wooden skeletons,
ashen rather than silver -
Naiads stripped of their
spring-summer, grey-green garb,
signifying sylvan vitality -
raise their spindly arms
in stark supplication,
towards an unseen Elysium,
reaching through the pall
of suspended tears,
seeking to summon
the disembodied spirits
of those reduced to dust,
ashes and earth below.
Some are specially adorned
with plaques and posies,
and various wreaths, both
seasonal and in memoriam,
natural and artificial,
fresh and faded,
unregulated remembrances
of lost loved ones
and traditions from before
Mary and her friends
went out to anoint
an absent body.
But the wind whispers gently,
barely spinning the blades
of children’s windmills
planted beneath the birches,
reminding us that these
living memorials, and those
whose prior existence
they mark, noted or not,
bequeath us our breath.
Selah
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