The Rites of Saints and Sparrows
31st August in the year of Our Lord 651,
Cuthbert sees a soul ascending star-shod
As Aiden is called heavenward home -
Significance only later learned
When Cuthbert knows his path to tread.
That path, transformed by indifferent tarmac,
Pockmarked with chewing gum and fag ends,
Would take my teenage feet to town.
I’d search for a stone cross in the hedgerow,
Streakbacked with bird lime,
Marking where Cuthbert’s body lay,
Behind the cricket ground,
On his way to his final resting place,
As traffic transported shoppers
To shiny out of town superstores
For Sunday service,
Pilgrims seeking a different shrine.
I’d watch the dunnocks
As they danced from branch to branch,
In daily defiant devotion,
Shrill eleisons amid the exhaust fumes,
Shufflewinged detrivitores,
Their ascetic life more survival than divine office,
Trilling their pater nesters.
15th September, 2024, Common Era,
This morning’s matins light,
Grey with a scuffling of early autumn,
Falls askance
As the organ,
Snoring with Sunday sanctity,
Shudders into being.
Mumbling our mimicked ministrations,
We shuffle eastwards.
There is a pain in my chest
I had not felt before,
Sharp like sorrow
Suddenly recalled.
Hymnbooks fan the air
Like hedge sparrows’ wings…
And there it is again, patterning my private petitions,
The stone cross in another county behind the cricket ground –
I wonder if they are dancing still, my dunnocks,
Along the hedgerow.
There’s a bench there now
So that you can take time to survey
The cross or the traffic,
Listen to the cricket or the birdsong.
Faith wears a different cloth depending on where you stand or sit.
But the effect is the same, I suppose, if the wood holds firm.
Clare Morris is a performance poet, writer and reviewer, based in Devon, UK. Her most recent collection is Devon Maid Walking (Jawbone Collective, 2023). She is the editor of The Jawbone Journal (launch date, May, 2025).
Amethyst Review 