Descended from Bellringers
It feels like calling on God
at his former address,
pulling on the sally.
A great-great grandfather
or someone allegedly
won prizes for his ringing,
so maybe He can give me
back my ball, or whatever
it is I feel I've lost.
Up and down the ringers' arms,
elderly pirates
boarding a higher purpose.
I brace myself to join their
already accomplished crew,
but I have waited too long;
my connection goes slack, and
I am lost. Something up there
snatches the rope from my grip,
and I am forced to watch
the younger bellmaster yank
the cord into submission,
the lowing of the lone bell
panic-tolling for my first
go at an ancient practice.
Later the tower captain
takes me up into the loft,
where on the visitors' plank
the more modern bells rebuke
my efforts to unhook
the moorings of my age;
and, somewhere up above,
the last surviving bell
of the original church
sits silently atop
warped medieval planks,
a shipwreck in the sky.
D. P. Gooding’s fiction has been featured in Stroud Short Stories: Volume 2 2015-2018 and two anthologies from New York-based publisher New Lit Salon Press, Startling Sci-Fi: New Tales of the Beyond and First Came Fear: New Tales of Horror. He has been a regular contributor to The Guardian and Information Professional, and in 2022 he was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize. He currently lives in a small village near the Cotswolds.
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