Ruth Ling
Courtyard in Stone
Soon after lush green dells, the barren moor.
In this Vanishing Lake, water disappears
irregularly, seeping away through a deep chalk layer.
A sheet of bog-cotton, a lonely white shimmer
hovering as souls visit limbo’s fields,
is a banner unfurling the way through
to a border of flowery uplands. Scholars already knew
it would prove increasingly rich in antiquities.
Earth-works: the plumb or round foundations
of dwellings where absence in excavation
inhabits space. Oval, almost house-boat shaped traces
and beehive hollows, these ‘courtyard’ places.
Broken stones with dents for a pillar or pier
might be for querns, or, I imagine, masts for sails.
From the kilns of two peoples, strewn now round lintels
and hearths, are the decorated shards of Cordoned Ware.
Seen from the air, the whole remains form one vast umbellifer,
threaded with round headed rampion and wild angelica.
Every room, each tombed souterrain
in the courtyards, has become an enclosed garden,
surveyed by the prehistoric look of a field of bracken
and foxglove, those purple-belled fingers of dead men.
Their walls are tended by the fairy woman’s plant as if by love,
and stone-crop and changing forget-me-not
and the odd latecoming sea-pink to colour the phantoms.
Page(s) 64
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The