Mysteries of Elsdon Churchyard

It was inevitable that I would finally write a poem about my ancestral home in Northumberland, the town of Elsdon, from my which great-great grandparents emigrated to Pennsylvania.

1

Why did the bell
of Elsdon Church
resound
across the landscape,

shaking the ground
of the tumulus mound
above the empty motte
of Elsdon Castle?

Why did the voice
of St. Cuthbert’s minister
echo deep mystery
in even a commonplace
sermon, bass-deep
from a voice that was
no lower than baritone?

Thank the medieval
architect who thrust
three horses’ skulls
upright into an oaken
cabinet,

a resonance box
suspended
within the bell-tower.

Bell above
thrice amplified below
and out across
the countryside;

preacher in pulpit
graced with the tone
of thunder-Jehovah.

2

Whose the stone
coffin that leans
against the wall

of St. Cuthbert’s?

No one can move it,
and no one knows
what sacred corpse
reclined within its hollow,
sculpted to human
silhouette.

Monks, it was said,
came here with relics
of St. Cuthbert,
in flight from the Vikings,

but who could flee
cross-country
with a stone sepulchre
and the eight horses
and cumbersome cart
it would take to haul
an entire saint
and his equipage?

No, this was not Cuthbert
whose tomb
rests finally in Durham,
but some unknown knight,
perhaps, who willed
himself a mighty coffin
where neither rat nor worm
could mar his godlike
features —

Yet what is left?
Lidless, leaning
against a wall
where dogs and derelicts
can lift a leg,

flesh, armor and bones
all gone, a hollow
in human outline,
no man and
Everyman.

3

Before Elli’s Valley
became “Elsdon,”
before the invading
Vikings,
before the Normans,
who built Elsdon Castle
before the Saxons,
guttering the Anglish
tongue, Romans
lived here and prospered,
secure in their reign
amid their household
and temple gods.

Here, against the unwilling
walls of Saint Cuthbert’s
a Roman gravestone.

To the divine Manes,

he of the prefect
of the first cohort
of the Augustan of the Lusitani,
also of the second cohort
of the Breuci, subcurator
of the Flaminian Way
and of the distribution
of maintenance,
subcurator of public works.

Julia Lucilla had this erected
to her husband well deserving.
He lived forty-eight years
six months and five days.

Pushed back southward
from the Antonine Wall
to Hadrian’s Wall, then out
of Britain altogether
as barbarians swarmed Europe,
Romans left only stones,
deep-buried lares and penates
beneath their houses,
the envied ruins
of colossal baths, the heads
and torsos of toppled gods.

Still, every English ghost
looks out to sea
for the dreaded Viking sails,
and treads lightly, lest
a Roman hand reach up
to seize its ankle.

Turn any stone
and a face looks up.