The Brean Lament

The waters they washed them ashore, ashore
And they never will sail the seas no more
We laid them along by the churchyard wall
And all in a row we buried them all
But their boots we buried below the tide
On Severn-side

The gulls they fly over so high, so high
To the sea where their bodies all safe do lie
They fly all around and loud they do call
Where all in a row we buried them all
But their boots we buried below the tide
On Severn-side

"spoken:"
The bodies of the drowned at sea were not buried at the church
But at the tideline, until the Eighteen-Seventies
And even when accorded Christian burial,
were never brought into the church itself
But buried in the sailors'
graveyard. The sea might wish to reclaim them
Many people believed, drowned sailors returned as seagulls
And that according to Astral Law,
a gull would attack an exhausted swimmer
Who was still managing to escape his
fate, out of sheer envy of the living
On many Western coasts it was the
practice, even in days of more Christian funerals
To bury the boots of the dead on the tideline

The waters they washed them ashore, ashore
And they never will sail the seas no more
We laid them along by the churchyard wall
And all in a row we buried them all
But their boots we buried below the tide
On Severn-side