Dun Aengus (poem)

Dun Aengus


Life threw a curve one day
down the steps,.the slopes, the sinkholes
of that carboniferous rock.
I stood at a promentory, jagged precipice
looking at hag's blood,
-- dark, splattered ocean beneath me-
and thought for just a minute
not that I could fly, like you thought I would tell you,
But that they-- who came and saw it, this
(Hag's blood with its wirey staircase)

They were the real birds in this case.

Birds who came from who knows where.
Some people have their `sources', and `artifacts'
And half expect you to eat that half-baked cookie
But the truth is, I'd rather revel in the mystery.

Tons and tons of stone- upon-stone,
grey-upon-green, murky white salt-upon-grass
bone-upon-bone
Thousand year stone-upon-ageless stone

That's where the real birds found their task.

And the modern peoples of this place.
Who knows where they've come from too. . .

All I know is that I've witnessed
climbing. Ascending. Mountaneering and traveening
so perilous,
to build stone fences
of those masterfully placed carbon-catchers
that it might as well be flying.

copyright 1996 FCV