stone bridge on route allihies ireland 2007 allihies co cork ireland picasaweb.google.com
Nothing older than stone but the soil and the sea and the sky.
Nothing stronger than stone but water and air and fire.
Nothing worthier than stone but the harpstring, the word and the tree.
Nothing humbler or stubborner than stone – whatever it be!
Stone is the bone of the world, under moor, under loam,
under ocean and churchyard-corruption of buried bone;
floor of the mountain, pound of the ocean, the world’s cord.
God’s creature, stone, that once was the vault of its Lord.
God gave me stone to know for a womb with child,
the time of delivery come but waiting the knife:
I free the stone-born glory into the air,
rounded and grooved and edged and grained and rare.
I have mastered the grain, the make, the temper of stone,
fingering it an considering, touching with hand and with soul,
quarrying it out of the course, piercing and severing it,
with a chirp of meeting metals like a bird’s chirp.
Basalt I know – bottle green still pools of stone
harder then hawk’s beak, shark’s tooth or tusk of the boar;
basalt – the glass-stone, stone without pore or wart’
causeway-stone stepped across Moyle-fjord in the north.
Granite I know – dust-pearl with silver eyes –
that moulds domed hills, with snow, rain, wind and time.
Marble – the multiple-tinted, the satin-flesh –
daughter of the King of white Greece in the lands of the west.
Dark flint I know with the feel of a fox’s tongue,
the unconsumed cold carrier of fire its young,
stone of hairedges and thornpoints, the dagger stone,
spearstone, swordstone, hatchet-stone, hearth-gilly stone.
O Christ, the stone which the builders rejected
and which is become the head of the corner,
part me from them the stone shall grind when it fall;
leave me not a stone in thine enemies’ hand!
Robert Farren (24 April 1909 – 29 December 1984) was an Irish poet.
Farren was a native of County Dublin, where he worked as a school teacher and was a director of broadcasting at RTE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Farren
and built by local stoneworkers. Located at Sneem, Kerry, Ireland pinterest.com
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