Kingston Chapel
21st Century
These Kingston Rocks
At Angmering
Once quarried stone
Now rock again
And covered twice a day
Lie gray and still
Amid their periwinkled greenery
And there, before the flood,
Young Vera knelt to pray.
The old chapel stands
On the tip of the tongue,
Like Nineveh
Filling holes in the mind.
Still where I sit
On this dog nurtured sward
Of England's sacred soil
Horizons only contrast
Shades of gray
And feathered darts
Diving through the eye's decay
Ignore all we call
Yesterday.
Out there was where
Young Vera learned to pray.
Her secret lies now locked
In recombining cells,
Out of our reach
And antiquarian treasury.
And these rocks now
Are what they were
Before she knelt,
Before first human felt
The need to favor gods
With such grand
Fragile flatteries.
DayPoems Poem No. 2286
<a href="http://www.daypoems.net/poems/2286.html">Kingston Chapel by William Brendan McPhillips</a>
The DayPoems Poetry Collection, www.daypoems.net
Timothy Bovee, editor
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