Grave thoughts

Who are you

when no-one sits here remembering, no-one
brings flowers on your deathday

when your bones have gone

when even your eternal stone will not reveal
your dearly missed, the forgotten when?


I realised, when I got home and looked at my few pictures, that departures have been on my mind today - the racks of CDs in HMV that I considered turning sepia, the crane disappearing into the mist above the Bodleian library (thinking of the helicopter crash in London this morning), these stones marking the departed, departing themselves.

One February a few years ago I was part of a campaign here to highlight the plight of asylum seekers for whom, the government accepted, it was too dangerous to return 'home' but whose asylum claims had nonetheless been rejected. People in limbo, with no money for food, with nowhere to sleep... We held  a workshop in the church then went outside to sleep among the gravestones. After the clubbers have gone home and before the street cleaners arrive it is a briefly peaceful place. I don't think we achieved anything other than to damage a few early daffodils. Certainly 'failed' asylum seekers are treated no better now than they were then.