Thread: Freshtival
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Unread 06-07-2021, 02:09 AM
Ann Drysdale's Avatar
Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Old South Wales (UK)
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Rocks, eh? This is from my very first collection.

The Menhirs at St. Pierre Quiberon

After a long game of follow-my-leader,
stumbling head-down, keeping out of range,
I saw my first “alignments”. Granite chunks,
lumpen, unlovely, slummocked in a queue
like students at a cashpoint on a campus.
Five almost-rows, but not quite half as straight
as teams of first-year infants at PE.
What Yorkshire folk call “neither nowt nor summat”.
A little grandeur, if you looked for it,
but mostly something awkwardly familiar.
I felt at home among the granite ghosts.

That odd one on the left – a little head
balanced on tea-tray shoulders, carefully.
The weatherworn excrescence at its back
suggested a small knapsack, carried high.
Its calculated military bearing
seeming an effort to outpace the shadow
of someone it would rather leave behind.
I knew that menhir. I had followed it,
crestfallen, all the way from Quiberon.

And so it came as something of a shock
to lay a finger on its lichened surface
and not to feel it flinch.

Last edited by Ann Drysdale; 07-23-2023 at 04:21 AM.
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