To touch them

Parts of the little church of St Andrew at Greensted in Essex are estimated to be over a thousand years old, and it is possible that the site has been a place of Christian worship for 1,300 years. It is the oldest wooden church in the world and the oldest wooden building in Europe. The fifty one logs that form the walls of the Anglo-Saxon part of the church are of oak, and to touch them is to be transported back to the forests where they once stood and to the people who cut, shaped and used them for their place of worship. Though somewhat outside the scope of Megalithic Poems the Church of St Andrew is of such antiquity that it deserves a mention here.

See also -
http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2009/03/greensted-church-essex.html

Of wood well made this wall

Not of stone

Heart of oak, cleft down
from top to bottom.
Fastened well in wooden sill
round side out towards winter's winds
flat side in for warmth.

Adze marks made here by a man
more than a thousand years ago.

Naes staenen!
But of wood well made this wall
Once fastened and thatched
A new hall for a new lord of all.

LS

NB Naes staenen - not of stone.

Badger

1

Pushing the wedge of his body
Between cromlech and stone circle,
He excavates down mine shafts
And back into the depths of the hill.

His path straight and narrow
And not like the fox's zig-zags,
The arc of the hare who leaves
A silhouette on the sky line.

Night's silence around his shoulders,
His face lit by the moon, he
Manages the earth with his paws,
Returns underground to die.

2

An intestine taking in
patches of dog's-mercury,
brambles, the bluebell wood;
a heel revolving acorns;
a head with a price on it
brushing cuckoo-spit, goose-grass;
a name that parishes borrow.

3

For the digger, the earth-dog
It is a difficult delivery
Once the tongs take hold,

Vulnerable his pig's snout
That lifted cow-pats for beetles,
Hedgehogs for the soft meat,

His limbs dragging after them
So many stones turned over,
The trees they tilted.

Michael Longley (For Raymond Piper)

Coetan Arthur Cromlech. St Davids Head, Wales. Image credit Moss

Time’s curtain parts

Dusk. The brush of a hare, in flight, flicks the long grass
in a gust of fast-fading foot beats. Time’s curtain parts
and on the hill bulls roar through bronze trumpets and rattles
click, fertile in the writhing flames - dancing thorn-shadow.
What masque is this? Abandon. Whitened faces and rough
breathing blow a swirling cloud to obscure it again.
Saturnalia. A turning word on the wind.

Storms leave a fossil in a pliable mind
and slick, stiff, five fingers grope, grey in the mist.
A terrible Titan lurks under the hand.
Inhumed on the hillside, he feels my flesh drawing close
and hungry horns oscillate the land.

gjrk

The Knockawaddra Alignment. County Cork, Eire. Image credit gjrk

Wiltshire Downs

The cuckoo's double note
Loosened like bubbles from a drowning throat
Floats through the air
In mockery of pipit, lark and stare.
The stable boys thud by
Their horses slinging divots at the sky
And with bright hooves
Printing the sodden turf with lucky grooves.
As still as a windhover
A shepherd in his napping coat leans over
His tall sheep-crook
And shearlings, tegs and yoes cons like a book.
And one tree-crowned long barrow
Stretched like a sow that has brought forth her farrow
Hides a king's bones
Lying like broken sticks among the stones.

Andrew Young (1885-1971)

The Long Stones Long Barrow at Beckhampton, Avebury

Silbury and the Age of Hills. Image credit Willow

This mound

This mound in some remote and dateless day
Rear'd o'er a Chieftain of the Age of Hills,
May here detain thee Traveller! from thy road
Not idly lingering. In his narrow house
Some Warrior sleeps below: his gallant deeds
Haply at many a solemn festival
The Bard has harp'd, but perish'd is the song
Of praise, as o'er these bleak and barren downs
The wind that passes and is heard no more.
Go Traveller on thy way, and contemplate
Glory's brief pageant, and remember then
That one good deed was never wrought in vain.

Robert Southey (1774–1843)

Under this wide Wiltshire sky. West Kennet Long Barrow. Image credit Willow

Prehistoric Burials

These barrows of the century-darkened dead,-
Memorials of oblivion, these turfed tombs
Of muttering ancestries whose fires, once red,
Now burn for me beyond mysterious glooms;
I pass them day by day while daylight fills
My sense of sight on these time-haunted hills.

Could I but watch those burials that began
Whole history - flint and bronze and iron beginnings,
When under this wide Wiltshire sky crude man
Warred with his world and augered our world-winnings!
Could I but enter that unholpen brain,
Cabined and comfortless and insecure,
That ruled some settlement on Salisbury Plain
And offered blood to blind primeval powers,-
Dim Caliban whose doom was to endure
Earth's ignorant nullity made strange with flowers.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Carnac. The Alignment of Menec

Carnac. Centre du ciel et de la mer

Beaucoup d’hommes sont venus,
Sont restés. Terre d’ossements,
Poussière d’ossements.

Il y avait donc
L’appel de Carnac.

Comment chantaient-ils,
Ceux des menhirs?

Peut-être est-ce là
Qu’ils avaient moins peur.

Centre du ciel et de la mer,
De la terre aussi,
La lumière le dit.

Chantant, eux,
Pas loin de la mer,
Pour être admis par la lumière.

Regardant la mer,
Lui tournant le dos,
Implorant la terre.

Eugène Guillevic

Many men have come,
Have stayed. Land of bones,
Powdered bones.

Thus there was
the call of Carnac.

How did they sing,
The menhir-people?

Perhaps it was there
They knew less fear.

Centre of the sky and of the sea,
Of the land as well,
The light says it.

Singing, they were,
Not far from the sea,
To be let in by the light.

Beholding the sea,
Turning their back to it,
Imploring the land.

Eugène Guillevic. Translated by John Montague

Tara

What did you get for cleaning your hands?
A few broad beans and a word from an ass?
There was no sword on the road to Moab
And I can’t see your beanstalk, Jack.
Show me your broken heart.

gjrk

Silbury and West Kennet from East Kennet Long Barrow

East Kennet Long Barrow

Love me,
will you,
drape your arms around my chest.

Keep me warm
while I sleep,
dreaming of my children to the West.

Do not carve me out
with a desperate hand
or avaricious eye.

But if you must,
keep your voices down
so that I can hear their hearts are still beating.

© Copyright Persephone Vandegrift 2008

Its whispered gift

The Sacred Way

Stonehenge

Sacred, sacrosanct, sanctuary
In the ruins of what was sacred space that we need back:

These monoliths to moon and sun remind us
That we abandoned the stars to ourselves, only to find
That we have no rite for being human

But now as the breeze stirs, and we slow our steps
Where stone breathes we can receive its whispered gift again

Jay Ramsay

From his longer poem The Sacred Way