merrivale at the summer solstice (poem)

moor 3 - acrylic, © Roselle Angwin 2006

Zenith of a solar cycle, and the completion of a cycle of Ground of Being days that I lead on Dartmoor at the year's quarter turning dates.

It's the month of the oak god, 'he who sets the head aflame with smoke' (of inspiration, visions and imaginings). The grain is swelling to ripeness, all the trees are in full leaf, and there's a pause, stillpoint, before the light sighs, and the fall away to harvest and the waning. 

Soon the beacons will be lit in the old lands' high places.

Four Winds car park: the old schoolhouse with its beech-topped stone walls has been annexed by the army on training manoeuvres, and the walls are guarded by soldiers

rifles trained

on the untamed reaches

of the moor

'Evocative of my childhood', says R, brought up in the Troubles of Nothern Ireland.

wind a little west of north

steady murmur of June traffic

the leat's insistent chatter

water crowsfoot cinquefoil dwarf bedstraw restharrow 

feathers of bog cotton opening like prayerflags

clear against clouds

the trickle of larksong

eight of us finding a way

to speak to the day

through silence

and in it

our lives

palmed

Merrivale stone row (Robbie Breadon)

damp chill

the wind in the reeds

passing through

and between 

the voices of silence 

these stones

We walk the horizontal, through time and through space, this land – four thousand years and more of footsteps beneath ours on this processional way between the pairs of opposites; and we walk the vertical, between the above and the below. Despite the chill H takes her shoes off, walks the way barefoot.

-->  
This threshold to the temple’s ancient heart

where the pairs of opposites – lingam, yoni –

dance their slow stone dance, in songlines

as they have forever, towards horizons

we can barely dream of, towards the circle

where dyads find both zenith and resolution –

constellations spun in their stone orbit.

Standing here with you, faint tang

of fox and the day still damp

in its newness, for a time the clouds

that keep us shouldered inwards

seem to lift towards that fold of trees,

towards the home that might at last

be edging into view, if we could let it.

And beyond, that finger of stone pointing to the sky. Above, on King Tor, one small figure – lightning conductor. Someone said that's what a poet needs to be, to catch fire from the gods to continue to light our way

an exuberance of lark

the wings in my chest

open

and this emergent sun

calling to the same in me

through thin rain

And then the reminder that the raven too needs to be present at the feast: this dying lamb; my distress, my helplessness

having again to meet full-on this intense need to save everything from suffering
and I can't

this the Wicked Stepmother, the Bad Fairy, the Loathly Lady: uninvited one

('because we have dismissed the dark / we cannot bear the light')

But now we put on the green of the drovers' track like a cloak, cross the little bridge into another land

 

the water, boulders, dwarf oaks, the lichen beards, the soft embrace of the grove

shadows of grass blades
legging it across the land
like lizards

R opens his hands

out leap two exclamations

grasshoppers

and me here
one more summer grass
in this flower meadow of the present moment

 *

(for more on the megalithic site of Merrivale, see my post from December 19th: Merrivale & the moor's white winter grasses)