It's Still Life

A Sonnet to a Lemon Drop

It’s like this, I said, you know when you walk 
through Lynch Gate at St Nicholas’s church, 
with the old yew tree leaning toward you, 
and every parishioner for a 1,000 years 

is buried underfoot, and tombstones lean 
just like that yew tree, and you open those 
church doors, heavy as oak can ever be, 
and it slams shut like thunder behind you

and you know you’ll never escape this place, 
and you walk along the transept, the organ 
in the loft inhaling breath and exhaling 
a blast that shims the beams back into place 

while the chorus sings “Hallelujah!”, well, 
that’s what it’s like to suck on a lemon drop.