The Woman in White

They paid their last respects – laid tulips
on the freshly-dug grave of the vicar’s late wife.
He’d seemed to take it in his stride. Said God moved
in mysterious ways – asked one and all to say a prayer.
Just two months wed, she was struck down in her prime –
a thrombosis, they said. It was at Evensong they found him,
slumped across a pew. A photo of his new bride on the seat
beside him. In his cold hands’ lectern, a bible and tucked between
its pages, a slip of paper that read. ‘Lord, forgive me. Disrespect
unintended, but I don’t understand. It seems I’ve lost the plot …
Somewhere between, ‘Our Father who art in heaven’ and Amen.