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COLDRUM STONES
by David Fairfax
Twenty-two skeletons were found.
They said it was a family, digging dreaming in the soiled bones, bones and flint together.
The silent family, now mere bones - fears, loves, hopes, despairs - are caught in dreams.
After millennia, do you lie in cabinets, boxes or wrapped in the dark of some museum cellar?
Do you know your son has numbers, written neatly in black ink on his thigh bone, or your daughter's skull with memories of smiles and laughter now has a ticket and a number?
Far, far away, are the stones
which were your grave,
standing proud against the down - dawn and sunset.
Do my eyes touch the same sun as yours?
And those trees, there, look: count back the barks and seeds through the centuries and see another tree, fresh and green which you once saw.
Fallen stones surround and there is only a hint of the tomb you built for yourselves.
Morris men dance on May morning where you once stood, cars in the car park and transistor radios singing to the stones, holiday makers, visitors, hikers, and the curious.
But at night, when darkness encloses, and moon and stars shine down, and everyone has gone - the stones remain.