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Harry Guest

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Duloe

for Penelope Shuttle

A blurred photo black and white
with my thumb in one corner
didn’t at the time catch nor
can it even now retain
wonder at the way life chose
to start in that site so long
out of use although the tall
monoliths of quartz set by
dead strangers in a flattened
circle carried on sparkling
in spite of an April sun
stubbornly shrouded above
the place where a cow had just
calved for as I approached I
saw the afterbirth hanging
as a great transparent bag
near the red yard of her end
of the cord and the newborn
curled on the turf its mother
licking it but I felt there
ought to have been a sudden
fall of sunlight to alter
colour in the grass laying
dark shadows to make sure each
of the stones stayed steady till
the calf could totter up on
to uncertain hooves and find
a teat to be nuzzling while
yellow springshine warmed its flanks
in welcome to a world where
meaning seems to have need of
an arbitrary link between
one ragged field and the lost
motives of prehistory far
simpler than mere witnessing
though easier as always
to set down than decipher

Duloe – a stone circle in southern Cornwall

Harry Guest’s collected poems, A Puzzling Harvest, appeared from Anvil in 2002. His third novel, Time After Time, was published in 2005.

Page(s) 73

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