Stones Dreaming

Photo by Martin Grey

                    Avebury

Sometimes language bears in its fossil rock
things once commonly known, now information
available to us only as tourists
as here poke through the earth
through the welter of houses from the last thousand years
through country roads, prim churches, blowzy pubs,
through male and female stones, the huge breast
called Silbury Hill, vast and cumbersome
works of a people whose will slumbers
in the stone circles, rows, wordless
as the thoughts of the sheep that graze.


Yet that will is potent, not with the dumb ferocity
and shapeliness of mountains, not with the bodily
eloquence of frightened or curious sheep.
Here are erected runes of language partly designed
to be read by clouds or goddesses, left for us
too carefully wrought to be ignored.
Sometimes with my hands on the warm/cold stone
I almost think I hear it in my bones.


Marge Piercy

"Older Yet, and Lovelier Far,

  this Mystery - and I will not forget."

Robin Williamson, "Five Denials on Merlin's Grave"

I share with poet Marge Piercy a deep wonderment at the presence of the Stones, set so laboriously and intentionally by such distant ancestors, to mark circles, leys, energy ebbs and flows and currents, Solstices and Equinoxes, moon crossings, and other, more mysterious means and ways that are remembered now only by the stones themselves, and the language of the land.  I'm excited about my soon to be opportunity to visit some of these sites, to see Avebury, Stonehenge, Callenish, and the sacred wellspring of the Chalice Well as well.

"Where Time began and will Begin",  Scottish Bard Robin Williamson begins his story and prayer (which are really one and the same) "I make reverence to the Ancestors and the Spirits of those yet unborn".  Perhaps the Beloved Silence he speaks of  is that Silence that contains the language of stones.