I wrote this a year ago, but left itvery much under-cooked; I think this is a fuller, more satisfying version.
Céide Fields
These walls, stone calligraphies,
almost six thousand years old,
predating Sumerian cuneiform,
built on the tablet of geologic time;
its pages stacked above the ocean,
stripes of the Céide cliffs
closed under the cover of bogland.
Peat that preserved their script,
a retelling of Neolithic life;
the walls of their fields like a net
thrown onto the land;
a farming community
perched above the roaring Atlantic,
their livestock in enclosures,
their lives lived in that lattice-work.
And now I think of Tom’s new walls,
the limestone boundaries of his fields;
how he has written his lines into this history,
albeit much further inland.
How he has added to the great patchwork,
six millennia in the making
and kept the stitch;
how glorious his walls stand.
