Gillian Stoneham
Visit to a Castle
We saw, first, the warm
Elegant arches framing a wild rose,
Then, abruptly, gorge from whose steep rock
The castle grew, a monstrous parasite.
Ferret-like we made
The sharp descent, from awkward passage stumbled
Into sudden space below the vaults.
We looked at kitchens, ovens big for oxen,
Bowls scooped out of chimneyside for salt.
Later, in prisoners' quarters,
We heard how they had lain with hands crooked out
To catch a trickle of water that crossed
Their gutted floor,
And, unseen, these same impenetrable
Stones beneath flesh became their only world,
The ground and boundary
Of cold and pain, hunger, shit and darkness.
We pitied them,
Pushed with our thought and pity against the impossible
Inhumanity, the unyielding past;
Yet only partly realised
Even then, our own imprisonment,
How each invaded
The other's freedom, creating chains and walls
More subtle and more cold than these worn boulders.
I think we did not know our actions' meaning,
Or recognise the insidious power of pity,
Of mistaken understanding and forced giving
To reduce and destroy;
A chill has followed since we left the dungeons,
More penetrating than the memory
Of old, hard deaths that neither of us willed.
Page(s) 259
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