The Whorl

The first thing I saw were seven pretty women, raking over rocks so old that bones did not exist and the most solid artefacts were giant shells filled with sediment from mountains washed by rivers to the sea to be crushed to the bowels of the earth and lifted once more to be mountain crags. They showed me the whorl of ancient shells from sequestered beaches crushed to sparkling quartzite

And I thought about their handsome men. Did they too dig this history before history, before wars began, before any war to end all wars had set up gravestones by hillside chapels where even men of god spurned the other cheek, denied their religion, crushing men to the bowels of the earth, blasting them as high as mountains in showers of splintering bone, the whirr of artillery shells on conscripted preachers smashed to bleaching fragments

Every man filled full of lead, every body covered with lime, every memory lost in the air, never to return to empty chairs round dismal tables, empty pews in dying churches, a generation of men lost to women who shouldered their own kitbag of troubles and lost themselves in silent service, the rituals of ringing bells and singing hymns as every element crumbles, beneath the wheel of ancress bells over consecrated benches sapped by corkscrew weevils

Our boots are full of lead, our beliefs are undermined, holes appear in our arguments, we ring them off with fence and stone, we deny any god who has denied the world, we walk easy paths to the devil and survey the stony road away, on Stiperstones we sit, we caterwaul and dream up new religions, mistake magnificence for purpose, imagine stories, and hear voices not our own, the wail of arcane spells from desiccated witches possessed by pointless pinnacles.