Dolmen

Three stones:

The one nearest shaped like a thumb coming from the cool mossed earth, pointing with granite joy to the chill grey sky;

The second, a wall that challenges me to be still and seek no further;

And the third soaring like a weighty bird on the wall and the thumb,

Looking wildly precarious above, yet speaking a certainty also. 

It has floated there for a long, long time.

And beneath, they say, the ancient dead yielded their bodies to the foundation’s soils

In hopes that they would journey through the threshold of the stones to the world that lies beyond. 

I hear them, on the plain’s breeze, singing of glory and life and something more,

A whisper.

It is overwhelmingly beautiful, aching, and sweet. 

I wish that they would rise with the thumb and say more, speak of what waits beyond the wall, soar with the weighted bird and carry me on their renewing breath. 

But my yearning seems to halt the wind. 

Have I hungered for too much?  Or too little. 

Their song fades in the gaping emptiness framed in stone.

I grow hollow and alone.   

More dead than the foundation souls even in their grounding silence.

I wait.  And wait.

Has the sun, dancing somewhere behind the gloomy, glowing blanket that is the sky moved an hour’s worth, or a life’s? 

I wait. 

Surely the wind will blow again; the voices will join to speak the truth I heard again.

But the open way between the stones yawns. 

The ground at my feet gathers at the tip of my nervous boot. 

There is but one thing to do. 

To pick up those feet and walk through.

Walk the threshold,

Past the thumb,

To see beyond the warning wall,

Hazard my breath beneath the precarious wild of the soaring stone bird,

And, perhaps, in the threshold’s grasp beyond my imagined safety

To hear the song anew

To swallow deep into my lungs God’s gasp

And join the earth’s whisper.