An uncanny and unfamiliar view: the sun gazing over the Sperrins.
Light granted sight and in the
smarting, sticky glow of day the range seemed endless.
Every peak,
protruding from plate like
vertebrae of the obscene Oilliphéist, aspired to pierce the clouds (had there been any) and
swelling like the ego of that Boeotian hunter, set Olympus and Rheasilvia to blushes.
An omnidirectional parsec of perpetual nihility that,
swallowing the senses,
renders proprioception void.
Everything suspended for a second or century under the watch of that inert sentinel, whose
magnitude mirrored the Cosmic Turtle.
Say some stray tenant of Mountsandel
had wandered through these ancient fields and looked, as I do, upon the eminence of this glen;
From now til then, this Precambrian master had aged but a second.
Words are feeble against this primordial Schist and cannot hope to evoke it.
But all perceived as hard then shifts; I see the hulk in its youth suffering
the divorce of Rodinia; drifting further from its peers – drowning.
Even now the car traced the scar carved in the little pinnacle.
Granted, it bore us tourists stoically on
Granite too pure for poetry.
Yet still I see, as clear as Sawel, the young stone struggling to breathe the noxious air;
Freezing and thawing with the trends of the earth and
Bearing it all alone.
No wonder it had become catatonic.
How fitting, that every traveller on their
commute between the Pillars of the North,
should be forced to stare
Eden
in the eyes and acknowledge
where
earth began.
