Blakely Raise

Whatever they were for, it has a voice
today. A dozen knee-high stones
mark an obscure neglected patch of nowhere
with a faint shout, a lost significance.
It is a song, it is a dance
of nothing. What has this strange beauty then
to say, to sing of women and men
to earths beyond the Earth? Ah God
they tell so much, these slight grey bumps of knowledge
with dabs of lichenous yellow, such a fund
of time’s intelligence adorns the rush-grass . . .
what do you hear? I hear a hymn
to nameless being. I see a constellation
in the dark ground, as in far other skies,
born of the low, the lost, the anonym.