Avebury secret

Mixed media painting. We came across a small stone, just outside the Avebury Circle which is used as a focus of devotion.

 

Secret Avebury.

 

We leave the circling sarsens,

peopling the village

with intimations of the distant past,

heading east into the sunrise, to the near horizon,

punctuated with the burial mounds of long-dead folk,

who forever overlook the sacred centre

of their ceremonies, beyond our certain knowledge.

A single pristine crocus pulls the gaze aside,

a snowy marker, a secret guide

indicating a faintly trodden path

between the hitherto unnoticed lines

of fading snowdrops at the trackway’s edge.

 

Runes, in white and red,

in green and blue, decorate the trees!

On Odin’s sacrificial ash are Odin’s signs:

protecting, proclaiming sanctuary and sanctity.

Behind the hedge, a hidden upright stone,

carefully selected, chosen for a private purpose,

as it is impossible to use those grey wethers

in the public’s eye, with offerings left to signify

allegiance to the earth, to sea and sky:

snail shells, starfish, feathers,

placed upon the ground,

and man-made gifts tied to the twigs above,

a clootie tree, hung with prayers

in form of woollen thread, of cotton scraps,

of coloured string, fluttering gently in the filtered breeze.

And someone has planted daffodils to bring to life

this tiny glade each coming spring.

 

Who knows what rites

the makers of this place perform?

what chants they sing, to whom they pray?

But it is enough to know that praise is given here,

and invocation made, that devotion is not dead

and grace is found,

today.

 

 

(1st prize Quantum Leap 5 x 5 competition 2006,

published in the anthology, March 2007.)

 

 

Done