Church going 2014

Here are two more poems I contributed to the Places of Poetry map -- arising from a day out that Clare and I spent in 2014, retracing by bike an excursion that antiquarians had made in 1868 to churches on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. For an account of the 2014 trip, see my tweets from the day. For an account of the 1868 trip see

Anon. 1869. 'Haddiscoe, September 16th, 1868' in 'General meetings and excursions'. Quarterly journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, January, pp. 13-16. Available online at http://bit.ly/1AGPUqB [accessed 8 July 2019]


1860s LITE

We aim to follow, not to recreate,
that learned tour in 1868
on horse-drawn omnibuses from the station
Haddiscoe had then (not today's location).
We cannot make the antiquarian
jaunt's mid-September mid-Victorian
quality of light. That we don't know.
Cooler planet. Steam trains at Haddiscoe.
At Oulton, night, earlier then, unlit,
made the last visit rush and shortened it.
'Postscript 1868' ends Possession
with a century-buried uncompletion.


SHADES OF 1860S LITE

We biked after the 1868ers,
tweeting their churches till the juice was low.
September, both day trips, theirs not so late as
ours, and their station nearer Haddiscoe.

Their Reverend John Gunn, at Flixton Ruin,
should have written a paper, but had not.
His ad-lib burns the page -- what not to do in
that case, shot down. I hope he soon forgot.

Had we found Flixton, by day's end? The map's
"Church (rems of)", this track, these beehives, this clump.
Glimpsed stonework under leaves. It was perhaps
church-shaped enough to be the ruin's stump.

Overgrown hulk, church shadow, where what should
have been done and was not has almost cooled.


My 1996 poem 'City rules' was an earlier glance at John Gunn's unfortunate memory lapse.