In memory of the patients of Winwick & Newchurch Hospitals
“…greenness is a kind of grief”.
Philip Larkin
In late summer sunlight
we step over shy heads of clover
hidden in the hospital meadow.
A thousand pilgrims, three to each plot,
rest in subterranean nightingale wards,
beyond reach of the single stone cross.
The first buried before the Great War,
the last interred in loving memory.
The afternoon soundscape soothes us -
distant cars crackle like vinyl,
a bass-note of working bees,
an urgent blackbird reminds us
that we all live somewhere
between days like this
and low-lit rooms.
We know these people well.
We recognise their dreams
and wounded tales.
So many in this quiet place
feared the policeman and the priest,
the official knock and the ambulance.
Some who lie here never reached old age,
never returned home, never walked abroad.
Gone the exiled girls, their outlawed sons,
gone the men who would be king or god,
injured soldiers, boys with broken hearts,
old women without doors who called for mum,
the listeners and silenced, sent to live
in town-like hospitals, away from home.
They surprise us in their namelessness
but for a handful left on flat, grey stones
Annie Newlove, Annie Stelfox,
James Samuel Drake, June 1935
Annie Smith, Elizabeth Green, died 1944.
One stone where the names are rubbed away
speaks for us, and every voyager in this plot
who took to little boats for other shores.
Pauline Rowe
Burning Bright 