Simon Armitage - Harmonium lyrics

The Farrand Chapelette was gathering dust in the shadowy porch of Marsden Church. And was due to be bundled off to the skip. Or was mine, for a song, if I wanted it. Sunlight, through stained gla**, which day to day could beatify saints and raise the dead, had aged the harmonium's softwood case and yellowed the fingernails of its keys. And one of its notes had lost its tongue, and holes were worn in both the treadles where the organist's feet, in grey, woollen socks and leather-soled shoes, had pedalled and pedalled. But its hummed harmonics still struck a chord: for a hundred years that organ had stood by the choristers' stalls, where father and son, each in their time, had opened their throats and gilded finches – like high notes – had streamed out. Through his own blue cloud of tobacco smog, with smoker's fingers and dottled thumbs, he comes to help me cart it away. And we carry it flat, laid on its back. And he, being him, can't help but say that the next box I'll shoulder through this nave will bear the freight of his own dead weight. And I, being me, then mouth in reply some shallow or sorry phrase or word too starved of breath to make itself heard.