Stone Circle

The most I've ever done is sense a ghost: not see,
but sense. No more perhaps than think it possible.

The people are all here. My embassy to them
is overtaxed; my best interpreter is at a loss
to excavate away the midden of time, the plastic

language of money and explosives. We need to get
a lot of tinpots on the skip before we talk, discard
celebrity, employment, entertainment, leisure,

down through the strata to these ghosts. But then -
if my interpreter were minded to flesh out, or cherry-pick,
talk up a little what he manages to hear -

I'd like to hear him say there was no power,
no beaded idle chieftain in the Maeshowe tomb,
but the finest quarryman only buried there,

the honoured handaxe-maker and the bard,
they only, buried there when their bones were clean,
and after ceremony within this circle.

It is August now in my time and language,
when the leaves on the ghosts of ancient trees
begin to yellow, and the grain is ready

to be sweated from its chaffy stubbornness
into winter food. This season, there is plenty.
These folk to whom I cannot speak, my devious

ambassador informs me, will gather here again,
playing on bird-bones, dancing for the harvest;
and in the season for betrothals, when young men

and girls from all the islands, and the great southern land,
will come to choose and to be chosen. Did you, I ask
in my patois overgrown with history, bring these great stones

from Yesnaby cliffs, and stand them upright here,
for anything less? For nothing less, I am told;
indeed for more besides: to acknowledge the Sun, receive

its messages, to let it speak in the darkest part
of the tomb at the Winter solstice; and most of all
to honour all the dead whose blood is in us.

I fancy I make out a word, a phrase.
Time clears like a sea-mist. I translate.