12    From the diary of a Guardian Angel

a used dome is / a sparrow cote / prodable man

A French miner dies and

I don’t care that this is the land

where a house is not level and

fuels refuse to affect its heart

So, I take the stone

that the Guru found more powerful than fire

The broken statues are

still and no doctor comes to change the game

I counsel my friend

                   God knows we will cover the game

                   every year… but slowly

I add quickly and with control

                   You’re a married man

                   I don’t know who Appina is to know

                   anything about Art

                   I know only that God loves her

                   If you cross the street to

                   brook this water goddess please

                   do it secretly

                   This is important and if later you lose

                   I can dig your grave

Ron gets what I mean and because of this

he runs

runs to the year’s end

and will again

There again

a lot of the time

I know you can’t go

for even half the days

of the year

Outside is a place of holy stones

So I decide to read hers next

                   You are a beautiful woman

                   another goddess I hope

                   Now

                   about your

                   out-of-control cows …

preamble to a raw corpse

The boy asks

                   Does the bed move the moon?

He gets up and says

                   Go, it’s red!

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 6 August  2022)

13    Cairn

Poor poor Lucien, they found his body at the bottom of the shaft,

With sombre desperation they brought him to the surface,

Where he could only fail to breathe the clear air of the upper world,

The doctor himself wept as they carried him back,

Lucien watched them with bemusement as they carried his husk away,

And did not notice the quiet calm with which he assayed the weeping relatives and aides,

As the twilight gathered into dusk, the rocky landscape became statuesque monuments,

Who themselves came alive as strange eldritch shapes,

This new family danced and sang with him on the fading staircase to darkness,

When this last stair came to a new realm beyond his stony brethren,

Here a sense returned to him that he knew whilst of flesh,

An overpowering fear of the sheer emptiness of tenebrous encroachment,

“How can the dead feel fear?” His fragmented spirit wondered

As it flew shrieking back down the chasm from whence it came,

Greeting only a deeper shade of black that rushed to meet it,

The once-was Lucien flew until the dark was so all encompassing,

Until the silence so complete, until the acceleration so unimportant,

That a quiescent peace reigned.

The ravaging fear ceased and our shade perceived that owing to its own fine matter,

It had plunged through the ground and into a space that was the earth itself.

With no sense of direction, the soul acted only on the intention of movement,

Endlessly seeking to discern one region from another, yet with no idea of direction to guide them,

Experienced an ethereal tremulous anxiety.

The notion that, with no direction, they might be moving towards the centre or even simply laterally.

Did they move? Were they moving?