Exhume

They’ve capped the shafts

To the mines of hell

Rust and brick remain

Empty shell

New houses spring up

At the roadside

Fresh plots at the graveyard

Filled, in time

I crouch at the graveside

Your stone cage

‘Forever in our hearts’

Words worn away

Those untold stories

Whole universes lost

Diaries in boxes

Hoarding dust in the loft

The daily forgetting

Breathed out in sighs

Shrouding the silence

Our ritual disguise

So we play detective

Imagine their faces

House numbers, street names

Overlooked places

Filling the void

With clues left behind

Joining the dots

On maps of the mind

Under cover of darkness

We seek out their relics

Labours of love

Like citadels derelict

No lights in the windows

No glass left at all

Just pulses that throb

And canaries that call

At the edge of the mine

We hurdle the gates

The palms of our hands

Are astrolabes

Inside their halls

Of brimstone and fire

We stand still and listen

To a voiceless choir

Ducking the fence-gap

Wire pierces my skin

Seams fall unbound

Canaries don’t sing 

What life in the ruins

Our ancestors built

Like flowers in concrete

Bloom bright, then wilt

We witness it all

And emerge unscathed

For time is a healer

Our scar’s on the page

O land of the living

Dead, but for myth

Why summon a ghost

When you dwell there in spirit?