Poetry by Mary Woodward

A fare for the ferryman

Your loss was, is, so terrible that we can still feel its shock,

the waves of weeping, the sickness, disbelief,

a world shifted, altered and lessened for ever.

Not much is left: some pieces of cloth in this display case,

darkened, thinning, ragged remnants of the very best,

a small white and gold linen tunic, a crosswoven fringed cloak

and the coffin you roofed with a few red tiles to make it seem,

as if games mattered anymore, like a little house.

The things you put in are here too - the animal rattle stick,

the amulet that hadn't worked, a toybox of beads and a handful

of shell fragments bright with their luminous violet lining:

things you couldn't bear to keep or throw out, that were his

as far as he had come to possess things, call anything his own.

And the coin to pay his way tucked under his tongue, with the last

finger touch on the familiar mouth, so small and closed for ever.

Payment for that unthinkable journey you had to watch him start,

that began with the first falling fist of earth, the worst moment,

we all know, the beginning of that feeling that lasts for weeks of

wanting to go back and dig and dig....anything, just to hold him

once, once more. But he was far out by then and on his way, cast off

for the other shore you couldn't begin to see or know of, on

his long, long journey through dumb centuries of hunger, dark and fear,

forests of stumbling, struggling creatures grabbing life bite by bite,

through fires, anger, countless decades of quarrels, changes for the worse,

drifting further and further from you, your language, ways of dressing,

eating, your gods and flint walled terrors, your enclosed oil- lit

safeties.

To land with us, small broken traveller, a treasure of ochred skeleton,

curved and distorted by the cold, protecting soil heavy over him,

with his favourite playthings, the wool you folded round so gently,

the silver where his just learning tongue had been, to rest finally

on our shore. And though you were, are, too far away on your bank

to watch us bring him in, we can see you, shadowed but unmistakeable

in your tears and human grief, your hands smeared with clay, and

we would tell you, if our shouts could carry, that there was a crossing,

how for almost nothing, your littlest coin, love has travelled.

Albion: the Abbot's clock

A calculated austerity: four a.m. awakenings, a life of

sparse, half rotten meals, shins calloused by devotion.

This abbot knew another world ahead, more urgent

than divine.He'd filled his scholar's head

with strange numbers, new angles of the dancing universe

sharper to him than the Holy Wounds and knew in

his own steady pulse that time could be ordered,

candles and water no longer adequate to mark

the driving sequence of its dimensions.

In his father's smithy he'd learned how to band wheels,

how to plan and fix the iron circling, how to bring

about the steady behaviours of spring and gear.

At nights he'd stay up to the first bell, no father

now to shoo him off to sleep, the silence of his chamber

lit and warmed by the labouring furnace's flicker.

Welding, joining, aligning, checking balances, he made

the slow hours of night bit by bit more exactly his.

Days became an irritating, chanted interruption,

criticisms of the expense shrivelling at one glance.

His reddened, flaking skin tempted them

to whisk him to the leper house, once and for all,

but he was less trouble than a new man might have been.

Harmless, this desire to tell the time. Merely another

madness for exactness. Happy with their vague days,

they were unsurprised when lightening struck his chamber,

roasting the bed and hangings; he was dragged out dying.

The oils of Extreme Unction sizzled on his pitted wrists.

What use his perfect numbers now, they crowed, believing

their murky senses enough to chart and measure the eternity

of earth's movement through the pattern of the stars.

The burning tractor

It's stopped at the point where it went up -

the side of the road on the top of Black Lion Hill,

cab and wheels framed by a shining square

of gold heat vibrating across as we edge by

and the fire engine that had bayed its way

through the village traffic ahead of me

now looks much too late and a yellow haired woman

in shorts, with a baby on her hip, is saying,

'Bugger, it's our only bloody tractor too',

while the flames swirl into the already hot afternoon,

upping the temperature to a moment of somewhere else,

Africa, Australia, somewhere incandescent, predatory.