This poem is about the bat colony at Durham Cathedral, when I spent a few weeks performing and teaching poetry there as part of the Gaia / Earth installation.
Caroline Burrows / @VerseCycle is a writer of poetry, prose: fiction and non-fiction. Her poems range thematically from cycling; trying to be environmentally friendly; to love and heartbreak; and depression and anxiety, while her flash fiction, short stories include comedy, speculative fiction, and fairy tales. Her most recent poetry commission #ChattertonRises for Glenside Hospital Museum with Bristol Festival of Ideas #APoeticCity aims to challenge stereotypes associated with mental health, and continues on from the previous commission ‘#PoetryHelps: Suicide Awareness & Prevention’. Her eco ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’ video poems were exhibited at Warrington’s Contemporary Art Exhibition 2020. She has been published in The 2020 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, The Wilfred Owen Association Journal, Cycle UK Magazine, The Lancaster One Minute Monologue 2019 collection, the Bristol Festival of Ideas website, The Rainbow Poems: Remembrance Edition, The Sunday Tribune , short-listed for the Nature in the Air 2020 Poetry Competition, and longlisted for Penguin Write Now 2020. She has featured on The Open Collab’s Monthly Poetry and Music live shows, the Sprocket Podcast (Ep: 548); Cycling Europe Podcast (Ep: 13), Bike Life: The Warmshowers Foundation Cycling podcast, on Spoken Label Poetry podcast, and on Poets Unplugged on Spotify. She has also been a speaker at The Cycle Touring Festival and Explorers Connect, and performed at the 2020 Lancaster Arts in the Park (virtual) Festival. She has an MA in Creative Writing, teaches poetry and creative writing workshops, and regularly performs her work live.
More of her work can be found under the name VerseCycle on YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/IG/Linktree.
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Copyright © 2024 Caroline Burrows.
#durhamcathedral #kyrielle #pipistrelle #bats #poetry
A Kyrielle for a Pipistrelle A Durham Cathedral choir, Sing notes only heard by higher Beings on their own camino, For whom faith involves letting go. In the home of the hereafter, Where sandstone meets wooden rafter, Safe havens hallowed though hollow, House those with the faith to let go. They gather their congregation, Every day for contemplation, In the Cloisters as Vespers flow, Readying their faith to let go. Each small Odin in robed vestment, Hangs its head for enlightenment, Knowing that the end of day’s glow, Arrives with faith in letting go. As the light turns crepuscular, Forms merge sacred and secular, The choir of chiropterans show, They all have faith. They all let go. Round and round the Cloisters they sing, Black shadows fleeting, fluttering, Their hymn beyond what humans know, With faith their own way, they let go. Except one’s landed, unfounded, Its world’s downside-up and grounded, A pup’s wrong location-echo, Has lost faith in where it should go. But healing hands lift the pup up, Blue medical gloves envelop, It in hues its eyes do not know, Faith exhausted, it won’t let go. It clings to fingers paternal, Which encourage flight supernal, But the bat gives its silent no, It’s lost faith in how to let go. Our group makes its own Kyrielle Eleison for the pipistrelle, Sung for the bat pup in limbo, Please, give it the faith to let go. Misguided, for now, it holds on, As our unanswered orison, Leaves us incommunicado, In good faith, we can’t let it go. In this sanctuary of earthlings, Sequestered, the maternal wings, Knows all their hands link to help grow, Faith in the act of letting go. The bat is placed for safekeeping, In a box to rest while sleeping, Til it rehears voices alto, Sing with their faith soaring, let go. In the same Cloisters, the next week, One tiny bat’s shadow, I seek, I find as above, so below, And keep the faith that it let go.