"Highgate Cemetery," by Aelred Down : a poem for Halloween season

The tombs are packed in and tiled

by mosses; smothered in ivy. By law,

there were no trees planted here

and yet the place is wild with them.

Over run. Near forested. They have

brought themselves in to this cold,

more fertile soil; leaning at angles

their roots split and lift the great, raw

tonnage of the sepulchers; the piled-

on generations piled on generations:

the vacancy of the real; the ruin and

stubbed out ends of days extinguished.

Upturned torches cast on heavy doors.

There are no spirits here. No memory

or doubt. No truth or honesty. And I

am unsure how I feel.

Our tour guide has

been in the profession for thirty years,

man and boy. His speeches hymn a

dry and brittle song that occasionally

reaches down inside into a dirty mirth

that has the echo of confession. He

has lived in hat-tipped silence for too

long. He points to facts and to then

to rumours; to the broken humour and

final pages of exhaled none too distant

ages. We stop and examine the fallen.

Jadis et naguere. Broken branches

spell the Cedar of Lebanon in its own

runes while Tommy Sayers the bare

knuckle boxer, the world's first heavy-

weight, who walked in a stove pipe

hat with gloves and cane, lies there.

He once fought The Tipton Slasher

for sixty one rounds. The Little Wonder

they called him then: 'The blows came

as from a catapult.' His mastiff, Lion,

in marmoreal calmness, guards him still.

They are but shadows now, of dry

stone on foliage; of broken steps

and pilgrimage. They are but dust

and clay and we, the ghosts of the

dead, eternal optimists, circle the

unlikely trees, the rings within them

measuring marriage of earth to that

beneath, and, emerging in to the white

noise of the day, we breathe. Exist.

Aelred Down lives in Gloucestershire, England, where he is currently working on his first poetry collection. "Highgate Cemetery" originally appeared at the Literary Kicks website.