Heptonstall Old Church
We are not the first
to share this vision of the iron sky,
and the wind haemorrhaging
these blasted stones.
A great bird landed here…
…drew out the lives from these ruins,
then flew south
and took the roof with it.
God is exposed now,
a mathematical probability
like the teeming rain.
A withered light flourishes
among the lintels and seriffed dead,
weaving
like the graveyard cat
scuffing our ankles.
We sit, knee-deep,
in an apocalypse of stone
made crazy paving
by the mad-eye
of pigeons roosting
in the fusty tower.
House martins scooter and shrive
beneath the church porch,
we bow our heads and enter.
Across the moors
the sky is a sea
reflected in the ball of your eye,
gulls soar
above the drifting
oil slicks of heather
and bog cotton lather.
Your hair tangles
like ribbons of soot
caught in the corner of your mouth.
There's nothing more here
than stained memory.
Further down the valley,
may spumes the hawthorn
and harebells tingle
in their own ecstasy.
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