Wilderspool Causeway

(written in one of the Covid interludes when social distancing was not emphasised as it had been)

After so many days without contact,
I can feel its place now –
the laying on of hands.
Still in the Co-op car park,
it looks like a pause for prayer,
meditation on the Saturday morning
grey-white sky, a moment to bring to mind
the things we’ve done or will,
but no – on the lady’s back
is a baby carrier, a momentarily
well-defined existential burden
not the weight of guilt for past decisions
marring a view of crows around pylons
from Bulmershe pavilion.

The hands are of those adjusting straps,
attending to the wide-eyed bobbing head,
ensuring there’s a cushion for the neck,
reassurance for that suspended time
around the shoulders, watching from behind their mum
benign meandering dogs, families strolling
under amorphous cloud forms
skirting crows around pylons.
The laying on of hands in constant support
of a thousand forms and moments:
milk or tube yoghurts, more strap adjustments,
human thermostats attentive
to all the climate’s subtle modulations.

The child is pre-guilt (forget Original Sin
on the Sussex Coast) – before transgression.
Where is that compelling argument
articulated in a sterile conference hall
on powerpoint from the pulpit,
hopped-up on notes and congregational shrapnel,
that children are born and die sinful?
The laying on of hands by cousins, aunts and brothers
from security to security, with mixed beliefs
in higher forms of providence, prop the oblivious
in the backpack carrier. Does it really take a wafer,
or some symbolic token, to show us sins forgiven?