If I were to make the movie, perhaps
I’d start with that four-year old kid
reaching up to touch the stones of the wall.
I wouldn’t be able to let you feel
the hard edges of the stony folds
where the softer rock has pulled back
like receding gums, only to expose
a sharpness morphed over millennia.
I would let the camera pan
over the old stone quarries
and the men who broke there.
Where the child once stood, dwarfed,
the stone wall seems to have shrunk.
Were I to make the movie, I’d follow
the small child’s short legs as it laboriously
climbs up the steps leading to the garden.
The giant’s causeway.
Even the grass used to reach up to her
green knees. The dark shed held alarming
secrets. Today it smells of rotting wood,
and cobwebs like bridal trains move in the breeze,
an orange evening sun touching the sticky organza
with a lick of fire. Would it burn with a hiss?
If I were to make the movie, I might show you
slate roofs. Close in on the satin sheen of fine-grained,
foliated slate. Perhaps this would be the right moment
for science, defining the slaty cleavage which has ‘ten
microns or less of space between layers. There is a
variety of definitions for cleavage’.
Indeed there is.
I remember my big brother, a master
of cleaveage and grain. By the side of the shed
he used to split the stone into thin sheets.
Stacked neatly into the ox cart he’d be off
to replace shingles taken down by storms.
Thirty years ago he scratched his mark
on the slates of the stable roof. I’d let
the camera zoom in on ‘M’ for Matthew.