A cross once hung there on the scarred
stone wall.  Its outline burnished like
the shadow of a nuclear blast-
did the wooden icon perish in fire?

Crumbling igneous walls quarried from the
Tees-Exe line, mulatto stone, time as no friend.  
Tumbling ancient brick, red lumps
and shards, no good for anything.

We pick through dandelion and thistle;
a ruined keep in waning time.  You my love
are the expert, a geological feature of certainty.
I am the temporary marker.

We hold hands in this pretty ruin, this old
box of death. Roof long gone as if in a grand
gesture of soul release, as lazy grasshoppers
scratch in the evening, warm and sublime.