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Cumberland Wall
Cumberland Wall - Gerard Benson
When I was Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, I became fascinated by a certain dry-stone wall which seemed to go on forever, really, and have a reputation, and I wrote a poem about it; and the lines are very, very short, one word, two, three, four at the most - they are usually short ones when they're four. And so it looks a little bit like the wall, though you won't hear that when I speak it.
Cumberland Wall
Prehistoric,
this wall
between nothing
and nothing,
air and air
that scrambles
crazily across
the hills,
not stopping
for outcrops
but staggering
on over them:
xylophone vertebrae,
skeleton of an
extinct beast,
mythologocal, even,
skinned dragon
of the crests
and valleys,
tottering on
through time and
distance, stone
on stone, poised
one on the other
by hands now bone
or dust, on and on
over rise into dell,
lichened, mossed,
gappy, showing
wedges of sky;
fossil holding
fossils, as it
clings and stumbles
determinedly forging
a ramshackle way
over the green
hillside, still
to be doing it
after the last
weapon has been
launched, the last
breath breathed,
the last promise
broken; perching
on humps of hill,
separating nothing
from nothing, air
from air, marking
a forgotten dogma
treading stonily
among buttercups;
shackling the slopes
where raven
and buzzard quarrel,
where skylarks swoop;
heavy necklace
of grey rocks
adorning the marshy
fields and daisy
constellations, strung
out to the sky edge.
from In Wordsworth’s Chair (Flambard, 1995), © Gerard Benson 1995, used by permission of the author.