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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Edited Jun 04, 2017, 16:14
Mar 19, 2005, 22:51
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Ancient Monuments They bide their time of serpentine Green lanes, in fields, with railings Round them and black cows; tall, pocked And pitted stones, grey, ochre-patched With moss, lodgings for lost spirits. Sometimes you have to ask their Whereabouts. A bent figure, in a hamlet Of three houses and a barn, will point Towards the moor. You will find them there, Aloof lean markers, erect in mud. Long Meg, Five Kings, Nine Maidens, Twelve Apostles: with such familiar names We make them part of ordinary lives. On callow pasture-land The Shearers and The Hurlers. Sometimes they keep their privacy In public places: nameless slender slabs Disguised as gate-posts in a hedge; and some, For centuries on duty as scratching posts, Are screened by ponies on blank uplands. Search out the furthest ones, slog on Through bog, bracken, bramble: arrive At short granite footings in a plan Vaguely elliptical, alignments sunk In turf strewn with sheep's droppings; And wonder whether it was this shrunk place The guide-book meant, or whether Over the next ridge the real chamber, Accurate by the stars, begins its secret At once to those who find it. Turn and look back. You'll see horizons Much like the ones they saw, The tomb-builders, millennium ago; The channel scratched by rain, the same old Sediment of dusk, winter returning. Dolerite, porphyry, gabbro fired At the earth's young heart: how those men Handled them. Set on back-breaking Geometry, the symmetries of solstice, What they awaited we, too, still wait. Looking for something else, I came once To a cromlech in a field of barley, Whoever framed that field had real Priorities. He sowed good grain To the tombs doorstep. No path. Led to the ancient death. The capstone, Set like a cauldron on three legs, Was marooned by the swimming crop. A gust and the cromlech floated, Motionless at time's moorings. Hissing dry sibilance, chafing Loquacious thrust of seed This way and that, in time and out Of it, would have capsized The tomb. It stayed becalmed. The bearded foam, rummaged By wind from the westerly sea-track, Broke short not over it. Skirted By squalls of that year's harvest, That tomb belonged in that field. The racing barley, erratically-bleached Bronze, cross-hatched with gold And yellow, did not stop short its tide In deference. It was the barley's World. Some monuments move. John Ormond Possibly dedicated to Alexander Thom (1894-1985) See also http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/forum/?thread=23046&message=568747 |
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Edited Oct 09, 2006, 10:43
Mar 21, 2005, 22:43
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A Dream of Solstice Qual e' colui che somniando vede, che dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa rimane, e l'altro a la mente non riede, cotal son io... Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII 'Like somebody who sees things when he's dreaming And after the dream lives with the aftermath Of what he felt, no other trace remaining, So I live now', for what I saw departs And is almost lost, although a distilled sweetness Still drops from it into my inner heart. It is the same with snow the sun releases, The same as when in wind, the hurried leaves Swirl round your ankles and the shaking hedges That had flopped their catkin cuff-lace and green sleeves Are sleet-whipped bare. Dawn light began stealing Through the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling, Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones Millennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. And now the planet turns Earth brow and templed earth, the crowd grows still In the wired-off precinct of the burial mounds, Flight 104 from New York audible As it descends on schedule into Dublin, Boyne Valley Centre Car Park already full, Waiting for seedling light on roof and windscreen. And as in illo tempore people marked The king's gold dagger when it plunged it in To the hilt in unsown ground, to start the work Of the world again, to speed the plough And plant the riddled grain, we watch through murk And overboiling cloud for the milted glow Of sunrise, for an eastern dazzle To send first light like share-shine in a furrow Steadily deeper, farther available, Creeping along the floor of the passage grave To backstone and capstone, holding its candle Under the rock-piled roof and the loam above. Seamus Heaney
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Pixxx 211 posts |
Mar 23, 2005, 13:52
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Stoney Stoney Stone Stone, Stoney Stoney Stone Stoney Stones. In the style of Baldrick, of course. Pix xx
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Mar 23, 2005, 14:17
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Thanks Pixxx (added to the growing stack :-).
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Pixxx 211 posts |
Mar 23, 2005, 14:33
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I've got more where that came from, I'm particularly inspired this wednesday, as I'm off to Arbor Low this w'end. Here we go: Henge henge, Circley Henge, With stones, As well. Pix xx
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Edited Oct 09, 2006, 10:42
Apr 01, 2005, 10:02
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This will always be the poem that reminds me of the view from West Kennet Long Barrow towards Silbury - perhaps it reminds you of your own 'slope of springing corn'. And on that slope of springing corn The self-same crimson hue Fell from the sky, that April morn, The same which now I view! William Wordsworth
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Edited Oct 09, 2006, 10:43
Apr 11, 2005, 22:14
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And when madness reigns in other words, a voice from a more familiar sanity... And see you, after rain, the trace Of mound and ditch and wall? O that was a Legion's camping-place, When Caesar sailed from Gaul. And see you marks that show and fade, Like shadows on the downs? O they are the lines the Flint men made, To guard their wondrous towns! Trackway and Camp and city lost, Salt marsh where now is corn; Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease, And so was England born! Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
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suave harv 704 posts |
Edited Oct 09, 2006, 10:43
Apr 11, 2005, 22:25
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Skara Brae by George Mackay Brown Here in our village in the west We are little regarded. The lords of tilth and loch Are Quarrying (we hear) Great stones to make a stone circle In the last of the snow A great one died In that stone hollow in the east. A winter sunset Will touch his mouth. He carries A cairngorm on his cold finger To the country of the dead. They come here from Birsay To take our fish for taxes. Otherwise We are left in peace With our small fires and pots. Will it be a morning for fishermen? The sun died in red flames Then the night swarmed with stars, like fish. The sea gives and takes. The sea Devoured four houses one winter. Ask the old one to make a clay lamp The ripening sun May be pleased with the small flame, at-plough-time.
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Apr 11, 2005, 22:37
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Thank you suave - duly added to the growing stack. And ahh... "Then the night swarmed with stars, like fish." Yes, I have seen skies like that... at Avebury last New Year's Eve, and years ago at Diamond Head in Hawaii - stars so bright you could read your newspaper by then (but there was nothing in the newspaper that could compare with such a 'night swarmed with stars').
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suave harv 704 posts |
Apr 11, 2005, 22:44
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This poem is on the wall in the visitor's cetnter at Skara Brae on Orkney. It took me ages to track down. . I had to join a Makay Brown Internet Forum to get the name of the book it's in, then buy the book off ebay. I should have just took a photo of the wall. . or even written it down. . but it's a fine poem. And the book's great too.
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