NO PEACE WITHOUT BITTERNESS
At the Fotheringhay Falcon Inn
we order ploughman’s lunch,
bread, cheese, pickles
hard-boiled eggs and ale,
unchanged over all these years
At the castle site where
Mary Queen of Scots, in black,
her stockings edged in silver
with green silk gaiters and
petticoats of velvet crimson,
clumsily was beheaded
and later James, her son, in rage
tore down these walls, no stone
remained, this motte alone,
this mound of earth and junk,
its view towards the church
‘floating on the hill
above the River Nene, a
galleon of Perpendicular on
a sea of corn’
On the long path to
Mary and the Saints, poplars
wait for us like sentinels, where
a soprano voice serenades the Autumn air
and a boy of five or six appears,
crying out ‘that’s my mummy’ and
so we stay of course to hear this Grace
sing, hand resting on her boy’s small head,
this motet, Nulla in Mundo,
– in this world, no honest peace
is free from bitterness, this voice
that lifts and carries us
Later in the village hall
over tea and homemade
double sponge, I do recall
my father and his wallet, with
the photo of his widowed mum,
kept until the end
– sons and their mothers