This poem describes my travels during the summer of 2024. At some point towards the end, when we were staying in Hartland, North Devon, I realised that there was an unexpected connection in the poems I had written about each stage of my journey. I felt they worked best as a single piece and this is ‘Buried with Care’.

Buried with Care

The past is always with us
Is in skeletons in clay,
In bones and DNA,
In maps unused,
In love refused,
In bodies in abandoned mines,
In sandstone’s sedimented lines.

Kilmartin Museum
You: your re-constructed skeleton,
Spread out as if you are a lesson.
Two children stare at the bright display
At you, in your grave, today.

One child reads aloud from a pristine screen;
Explaining that detailed data from your dentine,
And the study of isotopes,
Tell the story of your life,
Pathology shows that your ground-down teeth,
Describe a scant diet endured for thirty years,
And your funerary artefacts
Confirm your status with your peers.

But science does not say
That you were buried with care,
Your body curled around your favourite tools,
Laid gently on a mossy bed,
By those, I hope, who loved you,
Perhaps placing on your stiffening lips one last kiss.
I am sorry I did not tell the children this.

Tom at Acharn
Your buried, ancient genes
Have not confined you to a wheelchair.
You far outstrip your element
As the dolphin leaps into air.

Largo
I leave my maps behind,
Their legends have no use here.
The roads of my childhood
As familiar as the lines of my friend’s face;
Each contour connecting people to people and people to place.

Cornish Tin Mines
Arsenic, copper and tin,
Kill both kith and kin,
Arsenic chests, copper skin,
Whole families made by tin
While in the Wesleyan chapel still they sing
With emphysema-speckled lungs
To praise a god
Who holds the whole world in his hands
And miners in their place
As tightly as the dark embrace
Of the mine’s collapse.

Totnes
To leave love behind when love is not entirely lost,
To curl life around that loss
Has a painful beauty.

The art and craft is rare
That can bury love with care.

Hartland
Carboniferous shales and sandstones
Are thinly bedded,
Folded, faulted,
By sea and slope eroded.

We, too, living carboniferous lives,
Are thinly bedded.
With grace we, too, are folded and faulted,
Are eroded by love and dare
Believe we, too, may be buried with care.