Gray matter

In Competition No. 2938, to mark the tercentenary of Thomas Gray’s birth, you were invited to submit an ‘Elegy on a Country Churchyard’ written in the metre of his famous and enduringly popular poem. Every-one was a winner this week, but frustratingly we have room for only six. Those printed below take £25. The bonus fiver is Chris O’Carroll’s.

Time was these mossy stones drew reverent throngs
As Sundays called the village to this place,
But years have hushed our common prayers and songs.
We thrive now on a different brand of grace.

Jazz concerts in this yard have we convened,
And readings by the poets of the shire,
About whose verses this much we have gleaned:
Few know of them and fewer still admire.

The ladies of our garden club, without
Their clothing, but discreetly screened by flowers,
Have done that calendar you’ve heard about,
Big seller in the gift shop. Check our hours.

Our website is the envy (deadly sin)
Of all who work ye olde nostalgia zone.
We’re finding ways to pull the punters in,
And Melancholy marks me for her own.
Chris O’Carroll

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep
beneath this heaving, mould’ring turf, says Gray:
for them no more their busy housewives keep
their hearths and homes, for here is where they stay.

For them, these men whom Fame and Fortune failed
to lionise — the guiltless Cromwells, mute
inglorious Miltons, heroes who prevailed
against their tyrant fields, without repute

beyond their quaint community — we spare
some sympathy. We contemplate their graves.
We offer up this elegy. We care.
But what about those housewives, eh? Those slaves

who paced from laundry tubs to birthing beds
and back, whom Fame chose also to condemn
to unsung deeds and never-laurelled heads?
Not even Gray can spare a thought for them.
Julie Steiner

A Planning Notice on our churchyard gate
Proclaims the end of God in Speckley Down,
His plot now destined for a tarmacked fate
As link-road for the motorway to town.

Soon men will come to move these lichened stones
And then in high-viz jackets dig our dead
To sacrifice the sanctity of bones
For faster trips to Sainsbury’s instead.

Then will our hallowed spot have sunk to this —
From golden gateway for celestial souls,
To quicker access to terrestrial bliss
Via tins of Beanz and BOGOF toilet rolls.
Martin Parker

The little church surrenders to decay
Beside this half-forgotten resting-place,
Where once or twice lost sheep have gone astray
And cropped the grasses in a hallowed space

Pull back the ivy tendrils, scrape through moss
To where each stone emits a silent prayer,
Read in the worn-down letters loss on loss:
So many infant siblings buried there.

Six reverential yews for centuries
Have guarded safely all these loved remains;
Wild roses, rooted deep in memories,
Drop dew and petals on time’s spreading stains.

Creep through the heavy creaking door at last,
Breathe in the musty dimness for a while
And sense, inside this icon of the past,
The ghost of Philip Larkin in the aisle?
Alanna Blake

The stones are furred with moss, and stand askew;
Inscriptions fox the eye, are blurred and worn;
The warden’s left, the gardener’s overdue;
At dusk, the local rooks pour forth their scorn.

Along the paths, and armed with their respects,
The cousins come, with box files in their cars:
Here is the boneyard in which each detects
Their forebears, those whose language they must parse.

The ground is stern, unyielding: birth and death,
The names, and salutations, seem erased —
Beneath the yews, the land is out of breath:
Too late, one feels, for such an eagle gaze.

At dusk, the strangers rev their old exhausts,
And leave the churchyard (‘This is where I’m from’):
The graveyard fades. Its occupants are sourced
More usefully on ancestry.com.
Bill Greenwell

The mocking bleats of huddled downland sheep
Greet those who come to evensong tonight,
The dwindling few who quietly wish to keep
The glimmering embers of the faith alight.

The tower has stood for seven hundred years.
The font, of Purbeck stone, is older still.
And they endure, untouched by ovine jeers,
While darkness coolly falls on Shipton Hill.

The Nunc Dimittis and the grace release
Us to a Dorset dusk where headstones stare
And moles are left to spoil the turf in peace,
Their mounds to parody the man-made there.

Far from the twitterati’s egofest,
Where mobile-phone reception is not known,
The unsung fathers of this village rest,
And lichen writes their epitaphs on stone.
Hugh King