In the Churchyard
In the Churchyard by Peter Trower In the Churchyard Be still, love, the ghost moves in me again— the whatever, the itch without a name. It has woken like a fox in the numb passages to make me make music in the ashen time. Am I simply mad or was it more than the earth’s outbreathing rose from the churchyard grass to claim me when I was seven till I swayed dazed by the Norman church six centuries ancient, where bas-relief faces haunt the walls and the pews are polished glossy by a lineage of dutiful buttocks, reeled among gravestones locked like mossy grey teeth to the forefathered ground? Am I simply mad or was I truly invaded or taken by something sudden as a wind when the sky grew more blue and lucid than England normally allows a calligraphy o...