Dawn Wood lives in Longforgan, Perthshire, working as a hypnotherapist and an artist. Her poetry collections, published with Templar Poetry, include Quarry (2008), Ingathering (2013), and Declaration (2016).
No Clerestory
Middle-pointed, perpendicular, decorated gothic,
no clerestory. I like the thought that makes our remnant
a wandering-in-the-wilderness sort of church,
subsisting on a rock where nothing’s really accident,
the plot too narrow to afford a higher window series.
That cipher of the organ was no wee choir flute,
rather, the most bewildered grandest trumpet
lingered after Herod slew the little childer, on through A
and O and O and A, a lullaby accompaniment
that would have drowned the readings, till the pipe
was hoisted out. It has to be a cause of merriment,
stories notwithstanding, that silence acts to silence
via plain mechanics, automatic noise and random fault.
But silence is our ornate, architectural thought.