By Christian McKenna.
Half warcamp, blown up and smoking
Half a druid’s shoulder pad:
One ecclesiastical tree on a green field
But the hill’s soul is hedges, stockproof
Curly heather.
One forehead eye inside, blinking back.
When the last leaf is tapped off the tree
The druid inserts a clinker into his shoulder.
Two blinking cows watch on.
They are old ladies cursed to bovinity
For stamping out a bonfire.
You see this hill was a victim –
Riven, chained
Soul accused and its socket drank.
Hedge rings, elusive mountain levels
And disturbed sheep platforms.
Out-back, beyond the bonfire court
There exists a hedge stronghold – prams of gorse
Pregnant with blackbirds
And where crows are umbilically revived.
Cardboard cutouts of gorse. Slants of light on a leopard kill
In a cathedral.
Frogspawns of blood. Heather flowers.
And a rowan ingratiated with cobs of berries
Itself a brute, fleeced and crucified.
There is also the keep of the black rook
And his seventy-two hundred spruce.
Aisles and crosswords.
He invented cow-jacks and lameness.
He knicks clinkers.
On the walk down we are in pieces
The hill reformed us like a blackhole
Might take every atom
And put them back together again
I feel 10,000 years older and hoodwinked.
I fall from between the legs of cows in my night’s sleep.
