Alchemisland

Always felt lessons lessened me

I used to doodle during lessons except english and history

Now I dawdle along an endless present, accept lessons from history

Those who came first 

Who wore furs and trapped 

Dragged the first furrows 

Built fish traps 

Buried flint at Mount Sandel 

Ten thousand years old 

I suppose no one Noah knew came here 

His daughter Cessair later addition if not total fiction, friction between church and pagan, every God will have his day again 

As a saint of this or that

Banished what in days of old

Much advancement since their time

Yet to look upon their finery with modern eyes 

To see it shining below glass like a sleeping princess lies 

We know this to be a comforting lie we tell ourselves on wet eves

It is our disease

That we forget and each

Generation must rediscover all knowledge 

We are always on edge, upon the narrow ledge 

What knowledge hid they, they who built the henges 

Filled them with arrow, spear, the marrow 

Of their feared chieftains 

An ear or a nipple sufficient to mark as sacrifice 

The old king now a sacrifant pharmakos

This old rite dismal but sacrosanct

He has taken bites of the ripest fruits 

Now he gives his life to feed the roots

He feels the bite of many stone axes 

He feels it swallowing him, the trackless 

Bog

They walk back through fog, hod slung overshoulder by head

Red iron streams thread between rag-tasselled hawthorn trees 

Overhead the stars, underneath the dead 

The Oak King bloodied, broken, falls to his knees

The Holly King emboldened absconds with his keys

In Kildare Street museum

Behind clean glass old gold gleams

Ancient necklaces, shell and amber bead

Preserved carapaces of deceased kings

Fried by light bulbs, their ring pryed fingers 

In their repose some mote of pride yet lingers

An enormous boat, rather a single piece of worked timber

Lumber limber enough to navigate the reed choked estuaries.

---

The moon like a lanterned lure 

The night is bright and unobscure

When such occurs 

Their God returns 

The rite recurs

In furs clad 

Lord of the furze 

Every skittish doe, witchworn hare and hart his

He observes proudly the land he deserved

Delivered unto him 

These were sun people 

Their erections sport solar alignments

Their bones in millenia-long confinement 

Through ages languid or violent 

They have stood defiant 

Their meaning is pliant 

Every generation redefines the lines

Ley lines upon which they raised temples

To Lugh and Dagda, hills up which they pulled

Gargantuan megaliths, which Pantagruel should sweat beneath

With time their functions are engulfed 

By our notions of a mystic past, gulches

Where elves swapped miracles, bushes 

Which spoke, advanced atlantean culture

Sunk below the ultrawaves in bygone days

Where even a vulture

Cannot peck their bones

The tritones of those ancient ceremonies

Ring out still before the glass cases

As if Midas had touched it all.