WHERE POETS GO

I’ve recently returned from Cambridgeshire, an interesting part of England that I had never previously visited. It has much to commend it.
At one point, I stumbled on a small, rural church tucked away in a clearing just off a narrow road and surrounded on three sides by meadows. A side door was open so I was able to go in and, as I always do on such occasions, thought of Betjemin and Larkin, those secular saints whose church poems so impressed me when first I read them.

COUNTRY CHURCH
 
It feels intrusive, stepping in
through the arched door uninvited.
Money in the collection tin,
a pound coin, appears to right it.
I look about. The church seems small:
not thirty feet from wall to wall.

No stained glass here, no bleeding Christ,
just  hymn books, hassocks, modest pews.
In this place, such things must suffice
to promulgate the Gospel news.
The congregation, I suppose,
shrinks week by week and never grows.

Preponderance of tweedy suits,
of wives in self-effacing hats,
an absence, here, of fresh recruits,
of newcomers to swell the stats.
A failure somehow to connect,
is what the vicar must expect.

The stone floor makes my footsteps seem
funereal, my presence wrong
and out of place. No godly theme
runs through my life, I drift along
as most do, unreflectingly,
a spiritual amputee.

Outside, old gravestones vie with flowers
for my attention as I leave.
I came here to avoid Spring showers,
where others come to pray or grieve.
The dead are lost to us, I fear,
while daffodils return each year.