St. Cuthman of Steyning

I was a sad young shepherd,

and really would have preferred

my rocks and clouds, my sheep-turd

solitude. But times had grown so hard

there in the late seventh century, 

after my father died,

that it became my duty to carry

my paralyzed mother

(my birth had played strange hell with her),

or drag her, rather,

in a backward wheelbarrow

I’d roped around my shoulders,

begging from door to door.

From Mercia over the moors

into Sussex, we poor dears

begged our way. That is, I did.

She never said a word,

and finally, near Steyning, our frayed 

rope snapped. We stopped. I cut green withes

and twisted a flimsy, ersatz rope,

and cursed it with two oaths:

when this one broke, by God, I’d stop

forever. And on that spot,

goddammit, I’d build a church

where I could beg forever in place.

That rope soon broke as a matter of course,

and, fighting down my strong urge

to kill my mother and die,

I lifted her, very tenderly,

and laid her out on the ground.

I flipped the barrow over

to keep the hot sun off her,

and propped it with a pretty stick I found.  

Thus I built

the pitiful church I called

St. Cuthman’s 

Mother’s, underneath

whose roof her silence,

her life, suddenly ended.

I heard a choking, gurgling last breath. 

---And stood there, her only friend,

staring into the distance,

counting the tilted, jumbled horizons

known today as the South Downs,

and beyond them, one huge ocean.

In all my life, no one

I’d ever known had ever seen

an ocean before. I felt afraid.

I knelt and prayed.

For about fourteen centuries

that was all I did.

But after the first four the Normans came,

wading up out of the blue, great swarms of them,

victorious, industrious.

They built a real stone church

they called St. Andrew’s,

with a squat tower and small

but deafening bell

whose waves engulfed me, harmlessly, to reproach

my oafish fears

and drown out my selfish prayers.

But somehow, even nowadays,

weekdays, Sundays

and all her sad birthdays,

here I am,

still praying them.

Not kneeling, though. I sit. A bad

public statue in limestone,

watching over a seldom-visited

South Downs village, unserved by train.

                           (New Ohio Review No.27 (2020))