The Naming of Stones
Petrified being map the moor:
the Twelve Apostles, the Cow and Calf,
the Lanshaw Lad who’s never embraced
the Lanshaw Lass across the Delves.
I dip a finger in Weary Stone’s cups,
spill the rain from hollowed pools.
The pock-mark rock was worked and scored
millennia ago. We search the tomes
for sketches of the Badger, Neb
and Pepperpot, their rings and rungs,
the crosses with their curling arms
engraved in grit. I don’t care
to speculate their role or meaning.
We part the fronds of damp bracken
unsure what we’ll find beneath:
the petroglyphs of ancient art
or recent scrawls of names and dates,
hearts like bruises on the rock
exposed to sky, licked by weather,
framed in greens of lichen, moss.
