A Visit to Stonehenge
A traveling poem
The crows seem to know
why we are here.
One perches itself atop
a chiseled tenon,
a shadowed surveillance
amid dark spirals,
fingered wings and fog,
the echoes of their caws
scattering outward
into the green hills,
like so many
unanswered prayers,
it was important
to be buried here
in sight of the stones,
nineteen sacred mounds
in the nearest field alone,
a haunting
of memory and bone,
and we wonder
why here?
Home for silence,
grazing cattle,
and glittered light
filtered through shroud and shawl.
It’s a mystery
how these monoliths
were moved their miles
before man made wheels,
and so we come
to hear ourselves
speak these questions aloud,
to ask the trilithons,
the sarsens, the bluestones,
the meanings of their shapes,
their alignments with stars,
the solstices, the Altar
and the Slaughter Stone…
why here?
Is it healing, is it music?
Is it a calling card
to something beyond
the austere and breathless quiet
of the void? We ask, we ask,
we ask, and it is a comfort
sometimes to know
we are never alone
in all of this asking.
