The Heat and the Names

In memory of the Bayham Abbey rioters, who, in 1525, protested against its closure

Augustine Percyvall bites his lip
and in the dark a star is born or dies.
At Bayham the old geometries persist
and the ghosts wander in the sunshine.

John Large, John Mower, John Ramkyn, Alexander Love,
they did not know it like this – the walls down
and the masonry smashed – but they live
forever in the curves of the hexafoil

and the day is lengthening or already gone.
Back when the sun was high and the beer warm
there was talk that life would get better again
and there was noise

on the road to the abbey –
eight days in June 1525 with a hundred others,
they were kings and jesters, their faces
painted, the world that long week

upside-down. Still it closed down
and gradually fell down, burying time as we know it
in the parched grass. Trees took hold.
In the chapel now long-extinguished candles

have turned to flames of sap,
the stones outside almost too hot to touch
and little remains of those days,
except the heat and the names.