Nocturne for a Closed Spiritualist Church
After Jane Burn
I pass by every day on my journey home.
Its curved bricks are squeezed between
a department store and an office block.
Unobtrusive, appropriately liminal,
a church entering its own afterlife.
The windows are boarded up
like bruised lids, the doors are bolted
with paradoxical finality. A gaudy logo
from the business that moved in later
hangs above the archway.
I'm not sure why the venture failed,
whether they felt unwelcome, heard
footsteps and creaks at closing time.
There is still a chalk board on one wall
which lists the week's services: half-
scrubbed letters float in the winter twilight.
Mediumship was every Sunday, 4pm.
It's all very foreign for a Methodist agnostic,
and I linger, between belief, consider
what might happen if I knocked.
Leaves rattle against the step. I wonder where
the congregation has gone, what they took
with them, what they left behind.
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared in Atrium, Prole, Ink Sweat & Tears, Honest Ulsterman, and bath magg. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by Black Cat Poetry Press. You can find her here: @PoetBex.
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