* wuldres wealdend || woroldáre forgeaf
“Take as long as you like he’s ready for you.”
Shit and surgical spirit.
There, I’ve said it
It’s only taken 22 years
A forehead kissed. No words. No tears
Too airless. Two chests deflated.
His dressed in half Windsor-knotted Sunday best. But on a Thursday. Curated.
Dead cool.
The book tented open at line *seventeen
Steepled where his stomach would have been
His word. Diminished. Unfinished. Small.
Eviscerated.
I can magic all this back. Son. Father, wholly ghost.
But it’s the shit and the spirit I remember the most.
That and the piped music. Bland enough not to wake the dead.
“Go up to his room. He’s waiting for you,” she said.
The print of him was already smudged at the edges of the unmade bed.
Sheep hollow filling with snow.
So by mourning there’d be nothing left to show.
Except a bible-shaped drift
Undisturbed.
Pure white. An allegorical rift
Between Christian and pagan. Beowulf stabbed with a pencil (marked thus * by heart line 17)
Now in the other scene.
Morning. Curtains open shut then close. Blinking behind the veil as book and body burned.
* The glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.
This is a poem about loss. About christianity and paganism. And how, ultimately (by which I mean in the end) they are one in the same thing. When my dad died there were two books on his bedside table: Beowulf (Seamus Heaney’s translation of the unknown poet) and the bible.