Tomb

I looked in all the old places
Where the bones of the dead
And the stones they had become
Slept in each others arms.

I looked on ruined walls,
Weathered buildings so broken
Only soil and rubble kept their secret
And shaking grasses grew over them,
More centuries below ground
Than years above.

I saw whatever lives they once had
Pinned back like specimens on a slab
For speculation, for the eyes of posterity.
I saw the unraveled history of our descent.

I climbed a hill to find a tomb
Where the first darkness in it
Fell four millennia before I came
Swinging the hinged door wide
Bringing light into shadowy remains
Casting my own shadow instead.

© BH, 2016

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I spent a week on the Orkney islands. Taking a ruin to a ruin, some might say. But the traces of others who have gone before is something that interests me. When you see the marks of lives so old  and long departed. Longer gone than living. Everything is old. Me too.

The image is one I took of the interior of the chambered cairn at the Knowe of Yarso on Rousay. The shadow is an impression of how I might look with the sun behind me …and a following wind,