*Please remember that I make no pretensions to being a poet. Rather, I am a writer who occasionally writes in impressionist prose.
CASTLERIGG CIRCLE
I’ve been here before
on that one trip.
Twelve years old. My mother,
excited for my uncle to drive us
to these stones.
My uncle, bemused.
Myself, carsick.
My mother, aglow.
I can’t remember
if it was sunny or gray
I can’t remember
what I said, what I felt beyond
Why are we here?
“Why did we drive all this way for rocks?”
“They’re special rocks.”
“They look like regular rocks.”
“They’re like Stonehenge.”
“But this isn’t Stonehenge, these are just rocks.”
“Do you have any idea how old these are, or
How long they’ve stood here?”
No, I didn’t, because I was twelve.
And no, I still don’t
Because I’m nearly forty
Nearly the age she was
and just as incapable of comprehending
Age, and The Ages.
Prehistoric, a word, what does that mean?
Describe it for me in words
That YOU can understand.
These rocks look good after
A thousand years. Were they
sharper in the beginning,
rough-hewn? Were they
taller?
We don’t know if ancient peoples
of Cumbria used this stone
beneath my hand
for trade or events or religious
sacrifice. We don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know if my mother
told me this.
I don’t remember how long we
stayed. I wish I remembered.
I wish I’d listened.
I wish I’d appreciated my
Grandfather leading me to
his mother’s grave, and not
wished instead to go shopping.
I’m sorry, my family,
my long maternal line.
I’m sorry but I am
here now and I
wish you could be
too.
I want to come back here with my
Mother now that I
am nearly forty, and
we could appreciate the passage of
TIME
of which we had too little
and she will never walk
through these stones again, but
if I place my hand on
this large stone
right here – with the peaks as witness –
perhaps I can feel the atoms
of eleven generations
of Shaws dissolved into the
Northern soil.
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