The Envoi Competition Winner: THE EAST YORKSHIRE CREMATORIUM (for G.R.)

(The poem derived from attendance at a friend's funeral. He was a confirmed atheist and the service at the crematorium reflected this. The opening of the poem does, though, play with the idea of the Fates who spun, measured and cut each person's thread of life - many at the funeral said GR was an atheist but then spoke of the sad fate which had befallen him. During the service I was intrigued by the activities of the crows outside in the poplar trees. Crows were considered to be able to move between this world and the next and to foretell the future. The onomatopeic call "Cras!" is, I think, Latin for tomorrow and contributed in the ancient world to the sense of crows as messengers from beyond. In engineering a clack valve is a one-way valve. The poem is here presented as a single verse. For the Envoi competition it was submitted as four quatrains)



No God brought you to this place. The weave
unraveled: spun, measured and cut. Now each
standing at the lectern thumbs a thin thread
teasing for meaning back to the entwining knot.
Outside, the west wind pipes up the escarpment,
the shielding poplar line shivers; a silver
leaf mantilla drapes the black comb of trunks.
Eloquently, a calliope wheezing an old-time hymn,
the trees lament their bending. Through stained glass
I watch a crow court squawking sky secrets;
lifting from twisted thorn nests, woven tight
to the tree scaffold, they hang, between earth and cloud,
wings stiff, waiting on a wish to be made. Cras! Cras!
They clack their hollow hope. There is no future
beyond this building; a one-way valve, the heat
plume shimmering high into empty, weightless air.