Robert Tilleard

THE GREEN KNIGHT

In fourteen-eighteen Sir John Gawen died,

Buried here comforted by an angel.

Over the years the corrupting limestone

Blankets him in green protecting algae

To whimsically colour him the hue

Of his namesake’s enemy, the Green Knight.

The latter would have liked the happy fluke

That the man should become, even in death,

His doppelganger, his annoying twin,

Hiding an unchivalrous two-edged sword

With which to accomplish the teasing test

Of swapping dead deer for stolen kisses -

As if the hunted is now the hunter.

One-upmanship in death has no winners,

There can be no resounding sweet revenge,

Only reverberating frustration

In the echoing constant collisions

Between temptation and bleak resistance,

Ending in the clash of deadly face-offs.

The Green Knight’s sanguineous coat-of-arms

Has a shield with a golden pentangle;

For Sir Gawen the dead, but now green, knight,

An ancient sign of immortality

And of everlasting replication.

Pentangles have within them another

Pentangle which, still yet, has another.

In perpetuum et unum diem.

Or, as one should say: As night follows day

And – inescapably – knight follows knight.