Some muttered words on a windy night

Make me listen closely to her heart-beat.

Words can decline into cant – quick, flippant, arrogant

Listen! to the Gregorian chants of the monks:  singing across the centuries.

In silence, I admire the stonemason’s art, their way of seeing things,

Frozen in time, giving form to a vision of God-knows-what,

A palimpsest of languages: Latin, Norman-French, English

Each overtaken in time: vernacular or divine.

Her sculpted high cheek bones fixed at the funeral.

Her last words carved in rhyme

No coward soul is mine.

I follow in her footsteps, so many generations after,

Her soul seeps into mine.

As we stand at the edge of consciousness

Hold hands across the centuries

This cliff path crumbles into sky

Uplifted birds follow the heat haze

A vibration resonates, as in a sound painting,

Not far from me, in her dreamscape, 

Of richly tapestried cast-offs,

Our oblivions come and go

Birds roam all over the stippled, painted sky.