The Hill Poem by Garry Stanton

What am I searching for?
Who am I searching for?
I am looking for
Myself.

But this is no place
to walk
when lightning sparks
low, in a garnet-pocked
palette.

Grey dusk drops
between
rough primeval blades,
becoming black as tears.

Tussocks touch air, this
air of charcoal birch and dung and
creeping night. Corvids and
curlews sweep and greet,
towards high rookery, or river.

I feel them then, beneath,
feel the shift of old bone
and smell the ash of old dust
in this high,
windswept crypt.

Their voices vie
with the whispered breeze,
through clover-root and acidic
element.








A deep, strange tongue,
right enough. I know
there is no-one here, of course.
Just me, alone, surrounded.
They drone through chanters, their
clamour
of Claymores. It is a song long
and pitted, a drover’s road
of memory.

They grin pithily, these dust shapes
of the spirit. And then I find a coin
of moon in mud, watched over by
owls, an albino stag
and the last wolf of all.

Yes. I feel them and hear them.
I know them, their features hewn
from old rock and carbon.
I have found them.
But my search
will never end.