Rising from the green hilltop
Shining white as the swans sleeping
In the grass of St. Stephen’s Green
No bronze figures stand guard here
No columned gate, but blocks
Of disembodied granite ranged in front,
This entry a dark hole into the past
The tour group assembles
Listening to the interpretive talk
Astronomical alignments, hidden meanings
Avenues of light cut through the vanished forests,
Wolves howling in the dark wood
The people waiting for the divine light
To return to the world, to light the glorious
Dead one more time, pierce the foggy dew.
A mighty stone blocks the way
Covered in indecipherable spirals
Turns of river, turns of mind
Visions of forgotten power
Coursing of wind, a mare dropping
Her foal in the spring grass
Rooks gathering in the twisted trees.
The time has come, we pass,
The honored ticket holders,
Into ancient spectacle, file ahead ,
Turn shoulders, squeeze modern bellies
Between the carved stones, pass through
The dark womb of the white cow
Arrange ourselves in the chamber
Of forgotten mysteries, garbled tradition
Unreconciled meaning, stand in the false
Illumination of the electric light.
We hope to see forbidden things
We see
Stone corbelled on old stone
Fading fractal traceries pecked into the rock
Vestiges of ochre
Broken bowl at the heart of it all
Smashed with a pickaxe to yield
The unreal fairy gold
That vanishes with the dawn.
Light fades and we are as we began
In the dark, wondering, my mind lifts
stones of the past, no escape from the past,
Yesterday’s sacrifice of Lyra McKee in Derry,
the women at the ford,
sickness of the men of Ulster,
hero tied to his tree, mad king in his tree
Wakening of things
Best left in the dark.
Now only the faintest glimmer of light from the past
Barely perceptible in this oldest darkness.
There truly is no escape, so we return
To touristic spectacle, the light bulb
Casts again its three hundred watts
Down the sacred womb.
We see the broken bowl illumined
There is no recorded blare of brazen
Celtic trumpets, but the English woman
To my left has stopped her anxious
Stage-whispered monologue
Comforted by the return of the
Synthetic sun.
Author: Duncan MacNae
Exiled Gael, scion of the Dust Bowl, dweller within Divine Grace, admirer of mountains, I have made my peace with trout and the starlings. Looking for a river and healing trees.
duncanmacduncan5@gmail.com
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