Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Cracked and splintered from the living rock,
Dragged ten miles by hands that chafed and stung:
What did they think was living in the stone?
What dwells within it now, this wordless thing,
Unreadable meaning in its very shape?

They could not have known,
Those short, wild, ancient people,
How one star blew apart and then congealed
Into Sun and Earth, and brought forth life.

Patterns of wind in grass, the sound of rain,
Predictions in the clouds  -  they had these things.
Antler and iron, stone and hide and fur,
Seas of stars each night to wonder at.
They knew the language of this mighty stone.

Twenty-six feet high  -  that much again
Beneath the earth, deep-rooted like a tooth;
It stood two thousand years, before the church
Next door was built to sanctify the place.

The stars revolve around its leaded head.
The church and gravestones fade. It stands alone,
An outcrop of the past, not of this time,
Pointing upwards at the winter sun.

Whose power do I feel?
 The cold, hard mass that crumbles into soil
 And yields up grain? Is it the stone itself?

 Or do I feel the last faint warmth of blood
 Fallen from some broken, frightened creature
 Given to propitiate the stone?
 Most gods want blood  -  or so we all believe.

 Some Yorkshire woman would have known this stone;
 Her bones are hid, her name and language gone.
 And yet she's here, as close as blood to me  -
 The blood she shed to birth more ancestors,
 Whose flesh gave rise to mine.
 She and the stone are mute, and yet I feel
 The past wash by me like the winter wind,
 Raising the animal hairs along my arms.