Thom Satterlee
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Burning Wyclif: Poems
Thom Satterlee
Sometimes you have to raise the body up to burn it down. So it was with Wyclif, who rested forty-two years under chancel stone condemned by the Papacy, protected by the Crown. Finally, a bishop came with a few men, spades, shovels, a horse and cart. By then, not much was left of Wyclif—hair and skin gone, his bones slipped out of place inside the simple alb they’d buried him in. The bishop gathered what he could. Beside the River Swift, he lit a pile of wood and tossed the bones on one at a time, cursing the heretic from limb to limb. Afterwards, they shoveled ash into the water and no one even thought the word martyr.
