Setting a Place Apart
The shaded lane leads to the estuary
and mud banks sculpted by the constant sea,
expose their drying backs beneath the sun
before once more in ebb and flow are gone.
Over a sty a path leads from the lane
to skirt a manor standing proud and vain,
old tenants are recumbent beneath stone,
asserting grasp one name had on this home.
The granite gravestones incised history,
bare bones of all the truth that there might be
in the far dim lit land which is the past
where that old name ruled all from first to last.
The path threads through these sentries of lost time
to where a Gothic chapel sits aligned
with altar facing east, the rising sun,
built when God rose each day in everyone.
A God of plenty for the wealthy Squire,
a promised land to which the poor aspired,
rejoiced the hymning slave, his master free,
wishing the same in perpetuity.
The divine words in stone were made of sand
that in old times hourglass slow running and
religion that once permeated all
well symbolised within this Chapel’s walls.
Behind the arched oak door there lies a morgue
to gloryfy the power on which its gorged,
white marbled sentiments to hold the lie,
wealth and ambition here are sanctified.
No mention of the poor man in his field
who gave his life in labour for no yield,
whose closeness to his master of great name
would only come with death, for both the same.
For wealths so often blind to poverty,
thinks best to close its eyes so it can’t see,
the Squire set self apart from "lesser" man
as some choose from the drowning Syrian.
The past is to the present linked with sin,
humanity progresses from within,
compassion must be grown from empathy,
know that the poor and drowning we could be.
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