| From the book The Wild Rose | Legends and Fantasies
(1976 - 1978) |  |
| Magic Stone | Who knows whether he dreamed this?
There was the Feast of the Cross when no one
could go into the forest. The earth
quaked underfoot like a broken branch,
and the snakes licked the mysterious stone,
and other rocks grew like bamboos,
and he awoke. But the snakes hurried,
as he had just dreamed them, one after another.
The trees beat with their heavy branches,
and held him and looked like phantoms.
And, perhaps, the very fact that he lived and they all lived
was but the water, running by the windows?
And the joints moaned from one thought only.
But he will feed till full the hungry heart
who will go further into the ancient dark,
and will see a rock, and lie at the root,
and the happiness of the end will touch him.
“When my soul, like a chance traveller,
will nod in greeting and go away under the cloudburst, look:
Your earth is beautiful, o Lord God,
but it’s better that I should go out and be inside,
and be like the rain, and bide in hope,
to wake to the sounds of another rain,
and lie down again, and grow over the clothes,
and sleep without end, and sleep as I walk away...”
The bad-weather midnight blustered in the forest
and everything that wished was coming to its end.
The earth groaned and the soul was in anguish
and the stone scattered the light into pieces...
To sleep without end, and sleep as one walks away,
and to sleep as one approaches the wonderful stone,
to sleep, touching with living hands
the living shining of the night rain! | | Richard McKane | |
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