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Gary Allen

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Stone

This stone house and outbuildings are buried into the hillside:.
I watched him strain to lift stones that seemed then boulders,
yet he laid each one in place with the lightest touch.

He told me life and death are like Loughareema,
whose waters come and go, never more sure of himself
than when climbing Crocknacreeva to pen sheep.

And he could not understand the swelling in his belly -
three months I watched him wither on the bed
rising torturously to stare across the Issbawn,

until barely able to turn his head, he asked
who would finish the dry wall he had begun?

As though it alone could hold back
some quickening storm behind eyes already stone.

Baggy shapes are bent to the banks of moss,
the reverential echo of blade slicing between sullen mountans,
cars parked along one side of the road, like evening Mass.

On the day of his burial I looked out from Tievebulliagh
across Glenballyemon to Lurigethan and the sea at Red Bay.

We put into this land what we take out, he once said:
from this highland cairn I take down stone
to slot into the wall he could not finish.

 

Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co. Antrim. Poems widely published including Acumen, Chapman, The Devil, Honest Ulsterman, London Magazine, New Welsh Review, The North, Orbis, Poetry Ireland Review, Stand, Thumbscrew.

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