Motes of grey dust
Lie in creases of black cloth,
Rising as you move.
The ghosts of notes once sung in times
When pain and ecstasy were one.
How many years of faith are gone?

Now scents of musty vaults and tombs
Drift in your wake
And from the gestures of your hands
Falls incense faint and sweet.
Your touch on stone leaves spottings of pale wax,
The traces of your God on Earth.
The ministries of life and death
And all the frailties between
Lie softly heaped upon you,
Your moth-winged cairn.

I can no longer find the man I knew
Lost, as you are, in the strictures of your living Lord
And layered in the fragile moments of man’s mortality.
Eyes no longer meeting mine
But gazing always forwards
To your personal Calvary.