My name was – What does it matter?
– Paulus Silentiarius

It would happen so easily. The harassed mason,
busy elsewhere, leaves a small job of lettering
to his journeyman. Nothing elaborate,
no bigwig’s lengthy encomium; the master
would have seen to that himself. Five words,
a modest inscription for a modest stone.

And besides, what could go wrong? The fellow
is a good hand enough, and he has only
to follow a template. Which he does,
exactly, so that his master, returning,
reads, chiselled clear and strong into the stone,
HIC IACET CORPUS PUERI NOMINANDI.

“Here lies the body of the boy [Insert
Name Here]”. The mason is first speechless,
then all too voluble, but when he has cursed
himself calm, he admits the fault was his:
he should never have assumed the man could read
those shapes his eye followed so faithfully.

And now, what is to be done? A spoiled stone,
even so humble a one, is a heavy loss.
His clients can read Latin no better
than his craftsman; what they need in their grief
are the magic marks that say, at least to them,
that someone missing was once here.

 

---

Sheenagh Pugh has spent most of her life in Wales but now lives in Shetland. Her current collection is Short Days, Long Shadows {Seren 2014).