I paid my third visit to the Cholera Cemetery in Tredegar today. I took a friend of mine with me as I have been promising to take her for some time. She, like me, found it an emotional, lonely and evocative place.
I have blogged about this before on missjonesonline.blogspot.com so I won't repeat myself, but I will post a poem that I wrote after my first visit there some two years ago.
The Cholera Cemetery
-six standing gravestones visible. The rest have fallen with the winds of time or stray animals which, until relatively recently, were allowed to roam the moors and disturb them. The graves are now fenced in and only sheep are allowed to graze there to keep the grass and heathers at an acceptable length.
May their souls rest in peace and rise in glory.
The Cholera Cemetery
Lying like coffins,
granite grey and worn.
Headstones, where words,
once engraved,
have faded now.
While others,
swathed in moss.
Shaped like coffins. Broken in two.
Unkempt, uncared for.
Forgotten.
Erased from social order,
stigmatised in death, as in life.
Bleak, hard, lonely place,
apart from society
and conscience.
Only a secular burial,
prompt and impersonal.
Shunned by humanity.
People who once laughed,
danced, loved.
Made contribution to a culture
that has rejected them.
Now lying under mossy mounds
where no one remembers them.
The Cholera Cemetery
Lying like coffins,
granite grey and worn.
Headstones, where words,
once engraved,
have faded now.
While others,
swathed in moss.
Shaped like coffins. Broken in two.
Unkempt, uncared for.
Forgotten.
Erased from social order,
stigmatised in death, as in life.
Bleak, hard, lonely place,
apart from society
and conscience.
Only a secular burial,
prompt and impersonal.
Shunned by humanity.
People who once laughed,
danced, loved.
Made contribution to a culture
that has rejected them.
Now lying under mossy mounds
where no one remembers them.
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