resurrection

For the second time in my life, I was bimbling through the Blackdown Hills in a Moggy.

We were coming home from Devon, and the traffic on the M5 was heavy. And it was a good day for bimbling. So we headed eastward through Culmstock and Hemyock, along narrow lanes with high hedges that sometimes brushed the passenger window and set the aerial wobbling dangerously.

Beyond Churchinford, I saw a church tower among the trees, near a hilltop. It looked vaguely and unexpectedly Italianate, and very inviting. We pulled over. "I'm just going to detour up there," I told Katie, who had been doing a pretty good job at navigating by our tatty road atlas, for someone who loathes the job; "For who knows if we shall ever come this way again."

It was the church of St Mary's, at Buckland St Mary, and it was built in the 19th century. And I was glad we'd turned aside.

Most unexpected, and indeed startling, was this memorial to Madalena Louise Lance and her infant son, who both died shortly after his birth in 1839. The superscription reads In memory of one much beloved who departed this life clinging entirely to her Saviour as her only hope. And below her run the words I believe in the resurrection of the dead.

...I recall a former missionary telling us at school that Africans use wooden crosses on their graves to facilitate their picking them up and carrying them on Judgement Day. This very literal sense of a corporeal resurrection came to mind when I saw this monument; it reminded me of a time when my own faith was unshakeable and unquestioning...


Phil Draper (ChurchCrawler) adds: "The new 'Somerset North and Bristol' Pevsner is due out next month, and the South Somerset volume is also under revison for a new edition
The new information added... says this monument is unique in England, and is based on a similar theme at a church in Switzerland. Interestingly though there are two other memorials in Somerset where a man is shown climbing out of his coffin (Brent Knoll - in a panel below the main monument), and most famously at Rodney Stoke where the shrouded deceased is the main figure sitting up in his sarcophagus."

Alabaster Thomas

There's never enough time, is there? -today is National Poetry Day, and apparently the theme is Heroes and Heroines. So expect to see gossiping shoppers swapping sestinas, commuters quickly composing haiku, mechanics mouthing sonnets under bonnets. Heroically.

Or something.

My poem that I've been working on is still unfinished, but here it is, because when I put it up on the blog it will take up a life of its own and almost certainly sprout a good final verse. It's based on an encounter I had over in Wales last month.

"But what one will remember about New Bethel is the crowd of monuments in the BURIAL GROUND, and in particular the presumptuous memorial to James Thomas 1901, bearing a statue which overtops the chapel roof”

John Newman, Buildings of Wales: Gwent/Monmouthshire

Alabaster Thomas

Startlingly luminous there in the evening sunshine,
Mr Alabaster Thomas towers high above the tombs,
His haughty gaze fixed north to Pen y Fan on the horizon
Across New Bethel's rooftop cast in crepuscular gloom.

St Tudor's congregation saunter up to Mynyddislwyn;
Or sheep, come down for shearing, clatter down upon their way.
His gaze remains averted; other flocks are all alike to him
Intent to watch his chapel folk until the Judgement Day.

The crowded graves below him are both even and gregarious;
Grey Pennant slabs that huddle in the lee of the high wall.
Although his lofty pedestal is draughty and precarious
He scorns to turn his collar up and fears not the fall.

He has seen the hilltop slagheaps spread and grow above the pitheads
And the coal that fuelled an empire go to Newport Docks by rail
And the grass that spread and blanketed the slagheaps and the sidings
And the fires of Blackwood's foundries flare, and flicker out, and fail.

Rust upon the iron railings, creeping ivy on the masonry;
The roots of rosebay willowherb caress the resting skull;
The worms by now have long since tried that long-asserted dignity
Where the mouse that eats the blackberry takes refuge from the owl.

With the setting of the sun departs the glow of Alabaster-
He's just a deeper shadow now against the wheeling of the Plough.
Cars on the dual carriageway bring shoppers home from Asda
For dinner with the telly on then up the pub for after,
Time please, then car doors slamming, and the sound of distant laughter;
Then silence, and we say "Goodnight - but just for now..."


by the way, thanks to the wonder that is Street View, you can stand next to the chapel. But you won't see the sunset that Alabaster and I saw

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