Meeting Minutes (Friends Meeting House, Rochester) – a poem by Joseph Long

Meeting Minutes (Friends Meeting House, Rochester)

Hobbled by life, I searched for open doors
to escape this boastful, plug-in city.
Found one, just as the weather was coming fast. 
In here, my place was already set
with silence waiting, inviting me to sit.

Silence was a hail-fellow-well-met type
(of hitherto, I had not cared for), but
he had friends – each with eyes closed, 
messaging in their own private channels. I joined them
bringing only an elevated ear.

My blood clock listed the seconds, minutes. 
I watched shadows sit, stretch, then rise to leave – 
and then return like jealous agnostics.
Silence worked the room – a trainer breathing, 
train rails seething, the brush of frond on glass.

Silence told me, but I never asked.
Spoke with mailed fist – I considered leaving,
but silence invited me to sit.
Spoke with bare-knuckle – and I rose to leave, 
but silence invited me to sit.

With ten minutes left, silence left me to it
and when my ungummed, Wedgewood eyes opened,
something came on and came on unbidden.
Something much bigger than the rational,
something once buried, something once hidden.

Into drying weather and milk happy,
into once engraved streets (storm windows down),
into a human river – broad, boiling.
I heard nothing – and have heard nothing, since
the day silence invited me to sit.

 

Joseph Long lives and works on the Medway as a father and Engineer, writing poetry between shifts. He has a passion for works which reflect working class life & culture and his main influences are John Cooper Clarke, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Douglas Dunn, Ian Hamilton & Seamus Heaney.
Joseph has been published by Stand, Blackbox Manifold, The Rumen, The Brussels Review and ingénu/e and he was also highly commended in the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2024.