A Note on the composition of Stone Voices
Members of Lichfield’s
Company of Poets were asked to take the city’s cathedral as their inspiration and to write a number of poems in which various
“characters” in the cathedral spoke. In the finished poems, these characters included gargoyles, tomb-effigies, lecterns, prayer-cards, stone columns, lightning-rods, and a weatherworn statue of Charles II. With the poets’ permission, lines from these poems were taken and to be used as the raw material from which a longer, narrative poem was to be created. The lines were grouped according to sound and shape and rhythm, and from these groupings a number of related themes began to emerge, which were written down in free verse pieces composed entirely of lines from the poems. It was these free verse pieces that formed the structure for the final narrative poem,
Stone Voices .
As the poem is set out on the page, lines in italics are those taken from the original poems.
Stone Voices was performed by David Calcutt with The Company of Poets at the Lichfield Festival in July 2007.
- 1 -

‘Εν ‘αρχή ‘ην ο λόγος
In the beginning was the word
Και ο λόγος ‘ην...
And the word was...
...silence
Big doors shut fast
Ridged archways
Spikes of spires
Stone kings
Fixed in place
Dead eyes staring
Over a stone land.
My roots are buried deep
In the mouths of deadmen
The neatly clipped lawns,
The sleeping sunstruck houses,
Are the bolts drawn
Across the eye.
I was born of fire.
The rook’s ratchet
A tumble of feathers
Shedding black plumage
Is the twist of the key
In the ear’s lock.
An interceding angel skims blue sky
Black stone
Dulled windows
Dead flames
I will sing no more
But here, a well-worn pathway.
Here, a pale watersplash of light on the cobbles.
And here, by the door, the sign reads, “Welcome.”
Seeking solace and shelter
- 2 -

Grasp the handle.
Raise the latch.
Lean your weight against the hinge.
Open the door
Head bowed,
Enter.
- 3 -

I’d stayed too long waiting for the cathedral tour.
“You’re a little early,” I’d been told,
Politely, but firmly. I think I’d caught him off-guard,
In the middle of some duty he had to attend to.
“The tour’s not due to start yet. Please take a seat.
A guide will be with you in a little while.”
His footsteps had squeaked away across the stone flags,
Disappearing behind a door, which had closed
With a hushed whisper and click. Politely, but firmly.
And had left me to myself.
So I’d waited, and then wandered down the nave,
Along the avenue of fluted columns, past tombs
And hanging, threadbare flags
The choirstalls and the altar, and faces carved from stone
Our mouths are hard and cold
And had found myself at last behind the altar
Deep in the sombre cathedral silence
In the Lady Chapel. Candles burned
In a tray of sand. I’d lit one, out of habit,
Read some prayer cards, then found a chair
And sat to wait.
And woke
Some hours later in the dark.
******
I didn’t know what had happened.
Had I fallen asleep, been overlooked, forgotten?
But how? How could such a thing happen?
I was locked inside the cathedral and it was late.
Midnight, or later. Deep night.
I began to panic. I stood up.
I took a step. I froze. I was afraid to move.
Darkness
Silence
Cancellation of being
Absolute and utter zero existence.
- 4 -

I didn’t know what to do.
I was losing myself,
Pieces of me unravelling into the emptiness.
I forgot where I was.
Was I in a cave? Perhaps I was in a cave
My roots are buried deep
Hollowed out of earth’s bedrock millennia ago,
A place not of sanctuary or refuge or asylum,
Seeking shelter
But of minimal, bare, subsistence survival.
And darkness.
And silence.
Absolute and utter.
I put my hand out into the darkness
To reach out and touch
Hoping to find something to steady it there,
Something solid and real,
Length and breadth
Space and measure
The carved edge of a pillar,
The gritted surface of a wall.
And there was something there.
Cold
And it closed as stone over my fingers
And gripped them.
A hand.
******
Hush
Flicker of pale flame.
Shiver of light.
Hush
Whisper of pale voice
Tremor of breath.
Hush
Voiceflicker
Breathshiver
Lighttremor
Flamewhisper
- 5 -

Hush
Hush
Breath of light
And light of breath
Illuminating the eye, the ear
Hush
Candlflicker of syllable
Tongueflicker of flame
Hush
And a voice speaking
We are sleeping now
And another
We lie icy still
Two voices, speaking as one
Our dust motes float in timeless tedium
And the flame burned brighter
And the light burned stronger
And their voices burned fiercer
Our mouths are hard and cold
They were children, but with hags’ features,
Children, wearing ragged and sunken masks
The faces that gazed at me, dead faces.
The eyes in those faces, dead eyes.
The lips that moved, the mouths that opened, the tongues that spoke,
Dead lips, dead mouths, dead tongues.
The hand that gripped mine, a dead hand.
I tried to pull free
But the fingers gripped tighter
Tried to drag myself away
And the voices bit deeper
Hush
Listen
Listen to the silence
- 6 -

Other lives are transfixed here
Songless birds
Crying out
Hush
Listen to the silence
Listen
And I listened.
And I heard.
Stonefaces out of the stonewalls stonespeaking
The names of those whose flesh
Had faded to dust,
Become withering shadow,
Become shadow and echo.
Pray for me
“To the memory of Thomas White
Late of this city”
And for me
“In the vault near this place are interred
The remains of”
Please pray for
“Charlotte Anne, regretted and beloved”
All the poor and lonely
“In loving memory of”
“To the sacred memory of”
For my wife to be healed
“Daniel and William and
Charles and Edward”
Give me courage to face death
“Helen and Charlotte and
Mary and Ann”
Pleas of faith and hope displayed
The creaking voices of the Dead
Leaking through wallcracks,
Sneaking out of graveholes,
Names sliding free of the chiselled inscriptions
- 7 -

Dustwords drifting from scratched epitaphs,
Winding together wreathwraiths of memory,
Ghosttwistss of misty breath
Outbreathed from shroudsheets.
Beneath these gothic spires
My grieving flock entombed me
And now they came more insistent
My master will not wake
I will sing no more
Now they came harder and sharper-edged
Earth is harsh and unyielding
Stone tongues clacking a broken stone language
Our mouths are hidden deep
Snapped fragment of voices
Dark shadows buried
Ragged and wretched
Flameflash of broken and ignited tongues
Flying like glass from a smashed window
Beneath these grieving
Harsh and unyielding
Dark shadows buried
Hidden and ragged
Our mouths entombed
I will sing no more
Now I knew now where I was.
This was no place of worship or blessing.
No prayers were spoken here, no praisesongs sung.
This was a tomb, a mausoleum,
A vast charnel house,
Filled with the dumped
And shovelled voices of the dead.
Our mouths entombed
I will sing no more
Beneath these grieving
Harsh and unyielding
Dark shadows buried
Hidden and ragged
Still the hand gripped mine,
Still the fingers held fast,
As the voices gripped and held fast.
And I was pulled down among them,
Flailing, falling,
Like a man being dragged down into black water
Engulfed by the rush and swell of their cries.
- 8 -

I will sing no more
Beneath these grieving
Harsh and unyielding
Dark shadows buried
Hidden and ragged
Our mouths entombed
And suddenly they stopped.
Suddenly, silence, absolute and utter.
And a stillness, as of waiting.
End and beginning.
Then childfingers were lifted from my wrist,
And childfaces, untouched by death,
Looked into mine.
And first one spoke.
“We have led you to here to this place of death
So that you may stand where all things start.”
And then the other.
“To see beauty you must put on the mask of horror.
To see life you must gaze through the eyes of the dead.”
Two voices, speaking as one.
“Death is no end but a beginning.
And now, from here, your journey may begin.”
Beyond faith and grief,
Beyond hope and prayer,
To witness the fragility of life laid bare.
One voice, speaking as many.
Leave us now.
And the silence was split as by loud thunder,
And I saw a crack run up the length of one pillar,
And along the ceiling
From the West Door to the East Window,
And the columns buckled, the arches collapsed,
The windows shattered, the altar fell apart,
And the cathedral split wide open,
And with a grinding crash
TUMBLEROAR FALLSPLITTING
STONE UPON STONE
- 9 -

Fell in on top of me.
It was late in the day.
Towards evening. Ash-smoke grey light.
The sky’s edge a dying ember.
I stood on a flat valley plain. Marshland ahead of me, broken
By the dull glitter of pools. No wind. Still.
A mystery concealed.
A crow overhead flapped its tattered banner
Shedding black plumage
The shadow of a single tree lay crosswise on the grass.
There was no cathedral. I stood alone
Transfixed in a landscape unfamiliar to me, and I
Unknown to it.
But there, a boat was coming across the marsh.
A single figure pulled at the oars,
And I could see the effort it took,
The push and strain of the shoulders against the water’s drag,
The burn in the neck-muscles,
The twist in the spine.
The whole body aching.
Taking the weight.
At last the prow touched the bank.
The figure laid down the oars and climbed out.
Then turned towards me, and raised a hand, beckoning.
It was an old man.
Hair ragged and tangled.
A battered hat, patchwork tatty coat.
Shapeless boots, trouserbottoms tied with string.
Wiping his face with a filthy rag.
He had the look of some timeless and road-worn pilgrim.
A suppliant or penitent. Or maybe a tramp.
He was already speaking as I approached.
“It was a busy day for me,
The day of the battle.
Right here where you’re standing
- 10 -

Armies clashed and blood spilled
A bloody and a busy day. I didn’t get much rest.
Backwards and forwards, over the water,
From this shor e to that one.”
He glanced towards that shore, which lay in shadow
Hidden and deep, a mystery that no eye
Or mind could fathom concealed
Then carried on.
“I took their souls.
Earth took their bodies. As always.
It’s a good arrangement.
But what she takes she doesn’t keep for long.
That’s what I’m here to tell you.
What you’re here to witness.
Listen.”
Listen to the silence.
“Put your ear to the ground.
They’re moving. Getting ready to sprout
And speak again.”
I knelt, and pressed my ear to the ground
The earth was hard and cold
And, like when you put your ear to a shell
And you hear what seems to be the sea,
Close and far off, the hushed roar
And whisper of its waves, but you know it isn’t,
So now I heard deep down beneath the ground,
What seemed to be voices. And they were.
Voices planted in the earth, buried, hidden.
A clumped knot of rooted tongues,
Syllable-tangles,
Vowel, consonant, accent and dialect,
Unravelling and unwinding their separate languages,
The sap rise of speech
Leaking upwards
Word-shoots
Thrust up through the stony world.
They buried me deep
I was king of my domain
Warriors, raiders
Marched proudly to war
There are many of us
We dream of glories past
Spilled blood, evil deeds
We secret guardians
Shining and savage
Hidden deep
- 11 -

Strong and true
The foundation on which everything is built
I sat up. Looked round. The old man was gone.
In the west, the sky was blood red.
Over the marshes, a gathering darkness.
Congealing of shadow, a crumbling edge.
But here, closer, the light still held,
And the ground trembled under it,
As if a wind had passed over.
But no wind had passed.
There was no wind.
The ground was moving.
Or something was moving under the ground.
Something down there
Deep, far down
Was pushing its way up through the earth.
I thought of the voices I’d heard.
Icy, cold
I thought of the dead
Secret guardians
Those buried, warrior dead
Shining and savage.
I wondered what it was that was coming out.
It was a spike. A green spike of shoot.
Then another. And another. And then another.
Suddenly, all over the field,
Speartip shoots were shoving upwards
Into the air and the dying light
Trembling, shimmering
And with each thrust, a fingersnap of sound,
Tongue clicked against teeth,
A harsh, syllabic hiss. Lic.
And again. Lic.
Again and again. Lic. Lic.
The voices of the dead speaking a strange, new language.
Stone and mud
Bone and blood
Speaking themselves into new forms
That rose and stretched,
Flexed and strengthened
And lengthened,
Hands reaching out
- 12 -

Grasping the air, grappling ropetwists of light,
Hauling themselves up, climbing higher,
Thickening, widening to become trees
Standing high and tall
Great trees with sinewy branches
In a twigtangle sap rise of each day’s promise
With grainy creatures in the bark
And leafy creatures in the branches
Creatures of blood and fire and stone
And each of these creatures had its song
Green-draped in moss and lichen
Which was the song of being
The song of becoming
Of flux and change and shapes shifting
Flowing and forming. all transformed
Tongueflames flowering their hymn of praise.
I sing my voice
Fused of fire
Of stone and mud
Climbing higher
I sing my wings
To soar, to fly
Tumble of feathers
Skim blue sky
Hidden deep
Rough-hewn skin
Blood and bone
Still we dream
Eyes ignited
Born of fire
Our mystery
Transfixed here
Sacred words
Locked within
Textured tracks
Of human skin
See the singing
Gust of wind
Brightly shining
Glorious sound
Flowing golden
Strong and true
Singing out
- 13 -

With glorious flow
Thudding pulsing
My spirit flies
The riot of love
Coming alive
The creatures’ song ended.
Now it was night.
All around me the huge trees towered up.
A full moon had risen in the sky.
All was stillness and silence again.
But not the stillness of forest.
It was the stillness of stone.
I placed my hand against one of the trunks.
It had become stone.
It was the same with the others.
All the trees had become stone.
Their trunks had become pillars.
The sky entwined in their branches
Had become the roof.
The moon was a window
Through which the moonlight shone.
But the sap still pulsed,
And the heartblood beat,
And all was living,
And all was light,
And I stood inside the cathedral again.
******
“I know a different song.”
I was standing near a small doorway.
Human faces were flowering from the walls.
Flowforming pushing out and through,
With branches sprouting from their mouths,
And leaves uncurling from their heads,
So you couldn’t tell where the human ended
And the vegetable began,
As if being human and vegetable were the same thing.
The creatures of the forest,
The grainy creatures, the leafy creatures,
Were becoming human again,
And the song they’d been singing was still going on,
But it was silent now, a song of stone
Singing itself into these human forms,
- 14 -

With human faces rooted in stone.
That ’s what I was doing,
And I was waiting to see what would happen next,
When the voice
Bent and broken
Beast-like
Foul-tongued
Spoke.
“I know a different song.”
Something stood in the doorway, which was open now.
A shadowy figure. A shadow easing itself
Out of the shadows, a piece of the darkness tearing free.
And speaking with a voice of shadowy darkness.
“Leave these turnip-tops to sprout,”
It spat and hissed.
“They won’t be done for a long time yet.”
It shuffled forward and I caught a half-glimpse
Through sweating, bruising shadows
Of a beaked and lizard face.
“They need the dark for their business.
For ours, we the need light. It grinned a granite smile
Turned, and was gone. I followed through the door,
Up narrow, winding stairs,
Through another doorway at the top,
And out onto the roof.
I saw the creature clearly then.
Some kind of hunched, bird-reptile
With ragged wings and talons,
Contorted features, bulging eyes,
A monster. But something rough-hewn
In its form suggesting man –
Or man’s first try-out gone wrong.
Some kind of demon from a folk-tale.
I’d seen it before, stone head jutting
From the cathedral roof, with gaping jaws.
A gargoyle. A freak. The underbelly of belief.
“Behold!” it cried.
It stood there on the rooftop
With its arms and wings spread wide.
“I was king of my domain!”
I looked out. I saw nothing.
A pale sun, heavy mist.
Vague forms of landscape.
- 15 -

The light shut out
Everything else was hidden.
Buried, lost in the stillness.
The creature spoke again.
“Look at me now.
Dishonoured! Battered!
Broken! Ragged!
Beast-like! A winged freak!
Loathsome! Grotesque!”
It hobbled forward, shuffling a clumsy grace
And brought its beak close to my ears and hissed
“I have heard the voices of the dead.
And so have you. Now listen
To the voices of the living.”
He pointed to a small hole in the roof
Where a piece of stone piping poked through.
“That goes down to the bottom,” the creature said.
The people praying down below,
Who think they have a hot-line to their god,
This is where they’re prayers come out,
And drift away, black smoke and ash.”
It spat.
“Listen. Have a laugh.
You’ve not had many so far.”
I listened. And voices I’d heard before,
Faint and distant, cold and hollow,
Came drifting up.
Please pray for granddad.
The creature sniggered.
Give me courage to face death.
It giggled, snorted.
Pray for all the poor and lonely.
Howled, roared, guffawed.
And for me, for I am stale.
It rolled on its back. It clutched its sides.
Pray for my wife to be healed of her sickness.
It laughed loud and long.
“Requests for prayers!” it screeched,
Holding its sides and kicking its legs in the air.
Then lay back, exhausted, panting.
“What did I tell you? Good, eh?
As if it made any difference.
As if words changed anything,
Or made anything any better.
Up here there’s a different perspective.
You see life as it is. Without the frills. And death.
- 16 -

And there’s not much to choose between.
A bad joke, both of them, dreamed up by the god
That fashioned me.
”
It pointed upwards with a claw
Where a raven interceding angel
Floated through the mist, that was dissolving now.
“Me, and others of my kind.”
I soon saw what the creature meant by that.
As the raven passed the middle spire,
An arm shot out. Fingers closed around its neck,
Others tore at its wings, and the bloody mess
Tumbleshedding black plumefeathers
Was flung out, and landed at my feet.
And a voice called,
“We never rest!”
As if out of the stone, and another,
“We watch these walls!”
As if the stones themselves were speaking,
“We secret guardians!”
“Alert and vigilant!”
But it wasn’t the stones that were speaking.
It was something inside the stones.
Something that was now climbing out of the stones.
First one, then another,
Breaking free and tumbling out,
Snaking and spilling down the spires,
Leaping up and over and along the walls,
Streetgang nasty with goblin voices,
Mobbing the rooftop with their clubbed cries.
Peace!
Freedom!
Faith!
Hope!
Love!
They jeered and screamed and sneered and growled.
- 17 -

Grief!
Anger!
Rage!
Riot!
Despair!
They screeched and bawled and hooted and howled.
Peace!
Grief!
Freedom!
Anger!
Faith!
Rage!
Hope!
Riot!!
Love!
Despair!
Over and over
Again and again
Like some mad unholy hell’s-mouth mantra,
An invocation of curse conjuring the tempest
That was gathering above me
In a black knot of bruise.
Prithee pause!
All fell silent.
Then the creature in front of me straightened itself
And reared up to its full, horrible height,
And its scales were gleaming the wicked stormlight,
And there was a wild triumph in its voice as it cried out,
I was roughhewn from Man to mischief make!”
And then again, but softer, and to me,
“Behold the storm!”
Stormcloud.
Sheetflash.
Windsquall.
The cathedral bucked.
Its stones creaked.
The spires shuddered and snapped their rigging
A bolt of lightning jag-smacked down.
Thunder crashed.
The tower fell.
The cathedral burst into flames.
- 18 -

I stood among the ruins.
Early morning. Late evening.
I couldn’t tell.
The same kind of bruised half light.
And here
Charred and splintered beams.
Blackened, broken pillars.
Ash drifting on a reek of breeze.
The cathedral was a holocaust of tumbled stones.
The landscape round about, an apocalypse.
The scene of catastrophe, a hole in the head
From which everything was slowly seeping out.
All was still. That kind of stillness
With no before or after.
Moment by moment of nothing happening,
And nothing ever likely to happen again.
Then out of this stillness,
As if a handful of cinders was suddenly flung up,
There came the twittering of bat-voices, saying
I will sing no more
And
I will crumble in time
And
I was
We are
I stand here
We secret
Sad little song splinters scratching the ear.
My voice is
The songless
I lost my
- 19 -

Leave us
Then
Grief in
The sombre
Listen to the
Silence
And the swirl of ash in the wind,
That was the slow disintegration of a last ghost
Dying voiceless.
******
Some time later. The light the same.
Everything the same. I was still there.
There was nowhere to go.
What road had led here stopped
And did not lead back, nor go on.
Stillness. Silence.
Utter. Absolute.
Then
– a stir of breeze.
And there –
A figure, where there had been no one before.
Cloaked and hooded, squatting among the stones
And tapping at them. Tap.
I heard the sound.
Tap. A hard, brittle crack. Tap, tap.
The bite and clack of a chisel’s blade.
Tap.
I approached.
Still working, the figure spoke.
“It’s never finished. The work, I mean.
Our task’s simple.
To make the ordinary divine.
Simple and impossible. But the attempt’s worth it.
You might say the attempt is all there is.”
The figure hunched, bent closer to the stone,
And struck.
Tap.
But I could see no chisel.
- 20 -

“What others before me took up I continue,
And others will continue after me.
There’s no secret to it, no holy mystery.
It’s graft and sweat, blood and bone,
A little skill, and working the stone.”
Tap. Taptaptap. Tap.
“Generations of us are gathered here,
Fallen with these fallen stones,
Our dust and theirs mingled together.
But it’s no end. Only a new beginning.
And I’m just the latest in the line.
See, I put my mark.”
The figure struck again, tap, its whole body
Hammering forward,
And was suddenly transformed,
No longer a human figure, but a crow
A large crow or raven,
Striking the stone its beak
Tap.
As the figures was transformed
So too were the stones.
No longer stones, but bones,
And the broken cathedral was a vast body,
A giant flesh-stripped carcass
Lying spreadeagled on the ground where it had fallen,
A prone, sleeping Titan, chained to root and rock,
Unable to move, pinned
With a spike of silence
Tap.
And this crow, or raven, was trying to wake it,
Flinging up chippings and fragments of sound,
As if each fragment was the broken end of a word,
Or its snapped-off beginning,
And the crow was trying to string them together,
Unpicking a language out of these ruins,
And seeking to wake the voice that would speak it.
Tap.
The crow stopped.
It cocked its head to one side.
It listened, hearing something.
- 21 -

I listened. I heard.
A sound, far, deep, hidden
Almost not heard, but felt.
A low, tremulous vibration,
Running under the earth,
A shockwave of sound
Rising, lifting, and breaking through,
The open-throated outcry of a wordless voice.
A voice without language, seeking a language.
A voice without words, seeking words.
And finding them here.
The crow flew off.
Its job was done.
The voice spoke.
******
Song
Fitting itself to these chipped-off fragments of words.
Root
Fitting those fragments together.
Skin
Shaping them to sound.
Sap
Shaping sound to speech.
Earth
Shaping speech to meaning.
Blood
First one word, then another.
Branch
Stringing them together.
- 22 -

Stone
A necklace of speech.
Flower
The one voice speaking as many.
Breath
The many voices speaking as one
Shaping a song of stone
A prayer in air
Which was the dream of man,
Sleeping in earth,
Strapped to root,
Rooted to rock,
Waiting to stir, to shift, to wake,
And rise to his life
Of human joys.
******
Hush
Trembling
Hush
Sing
Hush
Breathe
Hush
Sing of
Root of skin
Lips of mud
Flower of blood
Flesh of bone
Tracing the thread of
The dancing web of
The sleeping voice of
The stony world
Earth rain sap light
Branches and flowers
- 23 -

Humble and terrible
Reaching out
Secret and savage
The stillness of movement
Deep within the weathered roots
Fluttering in the secret blood
Rising through the hidden earth
Skin of man
The heartbeat of time
The human eternal
Reaching and climbing
Flowing and forming
Mud stone flesh fire
Air wind sky voice
The length and breadth
The space and measure
The grace the swagger
Taking the weight
Strong and true
In riot
In peace
In rage
In faith
In storm
In grace
In war
In hope
In fire
In flesh
In pain
In beauty
In grief
In love
Call Wake Rise
Sing
The blood of man in the heart of stone
The spirit of stone in the heart of man.
******
- 24 -

The song ended.
I was in the cathedral.
No time had passed.
Nothing seemed to have changed.
I rose from the seat.
I walked back down the nave.
I came to the door.
I went outside.
The song continued.
- 25 -

Epilogue
Open the door
Lift the latch,
Step outside.
All as before, as if unchanging.
But ever-changing.
And lit.
Uprush of stonesongflowering light.
And tuned.
Tumble of stoneflameflowering song.
Rising
Falling
Rising
Falling
Risefalling in
Silence...
...
‘Εν ‘αρχή ‘ην ο λόγος
The End
- 26 -

- 27 -