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Turn a full circle, a sight seen by few,
place your mind at peace or you won’t feel with me
drain from the centre of your life the stresses and worries
of life today, put aside your fears. Look around
and sink into the embrace of timelessness.
In our slow, slow turn our eyes sink
Into Atlantic cold and grey, horizon ruled
Across a giant heavens, clouds the size of cities shrink
To insignificant details in the canvas of that great ocean
And greater spread of duck egg blue sky.
Across the rocks our gaze is cast, weathered
yet still
Arrogant in their fierce, sharp toothed insult to the tearing waves
And further yet the machair starts, wild flowers and rabbit cropped grass
Over ancient sand dunes blanketed below the gentle soft turf
Time weighs lightly on the land a century, a second of no great consequence.
Keep turning now and from the land great rolling
hills erupt
Birthed at the dawn of time in larval heat agony of scorched rock
The millennia wear at those patient ancients who saw the rise of life.
Moulded now they remember the great glaciers galloping across their slopes
Scouring and smoothing their final shape and grandeur
Now they wear their scree as grey long locks
of cailleach ageing
And watch the fleeting scene below as now our turn is complete
out to beach, long, white with shell sand and littered with
The flotsam and jetsam of Atlantic storm, and still no sign of
Humankind to disturb that harmony of time and age and now:
Our gaze moves in to where we stand at compass
point an ancient hand
Described from us a radius some two score feet and on that circle
Lifted great blue rock stones, some large some small rough torn
from mother earth and stood in watchful patience. I contemplate them
and in return three thousand years of family look back.
No signs or mere carvings blemish that natural
beauty,
my brethren choose to lift and stand these rocks
au natural as god and time intended, magnificent in plain
garb the rock covered here and there by pale green tufts
of that most slow growing plant alone can find a living there.
Near three thousand years my mind drifts back
to try to fathom
What drove my cousins then to lift and carry these giant markers
So far, to heave these fifteen sentinels of time aloft in their
Patient marking of the years from then ’till now can they
perhaps sense me as I sense them so close in space so far in time.
© Ray Husthwaite 2000
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