High Above Stonehenge

 

Your sneezes are lyrical

A sign of the spirits 

And the pollen is high

Walking the ancient path from the first village

Older even than the stonehenge

Which lies ahead of us 

as we journey 

Up a steady incline, 

to the west 

 

The old track 

Bordered by cornfields and meadows

Where the wheat is green

But growing, splashed by cornflowers

A reminder of the fallen 

The green turned red, 

first one then gangs of lads together 

In a line from the great hymn to the sun

Which is sinking into the red 

When it sets “in the western horizon

The world is in darkness,

In a state of death

Sleepers are in their rooms,

Heads covered, no eye sees another …

The darkness is a tomb,

And the earth lies numb,

Its creator has indeed set in the horizon”

 

We walk to King Barrow ridge

Hello to the line of buried renown

Enjoying their view to the henge 

Where time is ticked off by the

Sun striking the sun stone

Another age passes since their rule

 

To the west the first star appears

Lyra, the harp carrying eagle 

And twin souled Vega so bright 

Or is it Cygnus, the swan

Who brings the sun on her swift wings

From her place in the sky

The public triangle,

From which the sun will emerge

 

“All of us in foreign lands

Are kept alive by him

You place a Nile in the sky,

That it might descend to them,

With waves beating the mountains like the seas

To water the field with what they need”

 

The hours pass and still we are there

The third hour of the night,

The moon has risen and skimmed the sky

And as dawn comes is sinking

Burning Red into the west 

Time to walk down through the dragon’s breath

The misty hollows 

to the celestial hub

The stone pole about which all turns

To join thousands more

In hope of a golden dawn.

 

The first chink of white hot light on the horizon

Then a powerful rising, 

The fiery eye of god is on us

And as the poet Saphho spoke

“Like a god he seemed to me.”

“And the world comes into being from your gesture,

As you created it.

When you rise they live.”

 

Rejuvenated we return through the fields 

Now moist, the mist lying

On silver spider webs

Back to the king who is resting

to bring the good news

He already knows.