It's Still Life

Snowdrop Arithmetic

The church crouches
like something that survived
several endings.

Stone remembers
more than it admits.

Foundations laid when hands
believed in plagues
as weather.
Now it stands in our village,
pretending permanence.

Outside, the graveyard
is freckled with snowdrops.
White as surrender,
white as teeth.

Each bloom a small uprising.
Each stem threading upward
through the cold grammar
of bone.

No one planted them for the dead.
They simply discovered
there was space.

There may be as many blossoms
as there are femurs
stacked politely beneath them.

On Sundays the belfry
splits the air open:
weddings, funerals,
the same bell
practicing tonal indifference.

Inside:
wax breathing warmth,
oak pews burnished
by centuries of compliance,
terra cotta tiles
that refuse symmetry.

The floor tilts just enough
to remind you
certainty is architectural fiction.

Old beams lean overhead
like ribs.

And I wonder
if the snowdrops aren’t mourning at all
but counting.

Up there:
petals.

Down here:
teeth.

The earth keeping score
in white.

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photo is our local church in Worth, West Sussex. ©Misky 2006-2026.