The Day of Saints - Day 21, Enodoc

Looing towards Stepper's Point from the grounds of St Enodoc's Church

On what may have been the last sunny day for a while I decided to go to the North coast and visit a series of places of note, linked with saints. Having visited St Mabyn and St Endellion, I once again I found myself off the list, as like many other poetry pilgrims I very much wanted to visit the place where Sir John Betjemin is buried, St Enodoc's.

The grave stone marking where the poet is buried (Betjemin, that is!)

Now situated within the bounds of a golf course, I was tempted in writing a poem to say that it stood on holey ground, but thankfully I managed to resist. I found it an odd sort of place, approached (excuse the pun) by a path warning of flying golf balls, and with a tower that sticks up over the hedge like Noddy's hat. It was once known as 'Sinking Neddy' because it was buried for centuries under sand dunes. Needless to say, my poem has little if anything to do with most of that!

FOR ENODOC

A Sestina for St Enodoc

Nested deep amid the bunkers by the sea,

Surrounded by a hedge and many an angled stone

and where daily tide and tide run out their course

Remains a weathered chapel as a place of prayer

that bears the name of Enodoc, a Celtic saint

Who journeyed there to find herself a hermit space.

Wilder then the landscape of her chosen space,

But the same, the nearby crashing of the sea,

Enodoc, considered now to be a saint,

Was then content to find herself a simple stone

Thereon to raise her thanks to God in joyous prayer,

And psalms of praises sing to him in time's due course.

The challenge of her hermit life she felt, of course,

of making home, collecting what was in that space,

But in her want she looked to God in daily prayer

The gentle words she spoke would mingle with the sea

As it broke along the shoreline's hardened stone.

But harder grew the faith of Enodoc, the saint.

Battered by the rain and wind the sister saint

Was never once diverted her from prayer's course

But hourly, by duty bound, upon her stone

The sound of intercessions lifted in that space -

Numberless, like pebbles thrown up by the sea

they roared on tides, in pulsing waves of fervent prayer.

Pilgrims who in later times, did sense the prayer

Trebetherick had heard from Enodoc, the saint

Set out to clear the land and build beside the sea

A holy house of worship and for prayer to course

to God as once it had within the hermit's space,

And crafted well with hardwood, glass and fashioned stone.

Enter by the arch and see the aging stone

Erected near for poet, commoner and saint,

Linger by the way, prepare for God a prayer,

Then walk within, and breathe the silence of the space

in pilgrimage, to make fair way upon life's course,

Like Enodoc, your praises mingle with the sea.

The course of time and tide will doubtless weather stone,

But not erase the work the saint did by the sea

So likewise make your space and build to last, with prayer.

---------------

The approach beneath the gate arch