Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

Early afternoon, as the sun was setting, I took a piece of mudstone,

flaked by cunning hands twelve thousand years ago,

from the pile where the archaeologists discarded their waste,

took a crayon of brickish ochre from the beach. I coloured in a jut of beach-rock,

where a chance arrangement of lines and dents had made a fish.

Or I revealed a fish that had been waiting in the rock.

Or thousands of years ago, in that rock, someone had carved a fish.

To the south, up on the hill, Vikings made a village:

huts, longhouses, and even a hall. The stone outlines remain,

each habitation’s corpse limned by heather and bracken.

Vantage over the bay. They could see for miles, there.

The bones of the Earth are stones. We move them, split them, flake them,

leave cups and lines and hollows in them. Leave stone behind.

When we leave no trace of flesh or hair or breath.

When we leave no trace of wood or thatch or corn.

When we leave no trace of bone or ash or blood.

As the winter sun rises and falls like the opening of a single eye

or a bird that flies low on the horizon, then returns to dark

and all the stars there ever were come out.

To the north, on a different hill, a stone circle,

near to the other stones, the ones the old man called the graveyard,

where something happened, perhaps six thousand years ago.

The standing centre stone

where a sharp stone edge cut the child’s throat at sun-up,

in the mid bleakwinter, to bring the sun and warmth and life back to the land.

If one day, as it may prove, the sun still burns,

The ones who come after the ones who come after us

will see, beneath different star-patterns, the old stones here.

The cairn that keeps the wights beneath from walking,

besides our Flora’s secret tumbledown house.

They will observe our tumbled walls and boundaries,

and one might find the fine and fancy neolithic stone

(carved and hollowed by hands now dead a million years)

I use to keep the lid on the bin, when the wind gets high.

They will not know we called ourselves the thinking people.

They will wonder about us, then say to each other that

we moved the rocks to nest in, or flaked them by instinct.

And, pointing to an ochre fish carved on a rock,

or picking up a flake of mudstone, categorise us,

with the landslides and the volcanoes,

as the movers of the stones.