Mark Leech

The Tumulus Mutters

Lump of a ghost
like the scalp of a god hill hooded.
           In rain I soften
                                and any searching arms
could thrust my grasstop through
for the root-webbed passageways
down to gold-dressed bones:
     the treasured myth of whitebeards
     photographed among their labourers.

              The land is my haunting.
In the sheets of winter,
in the tautening of fog
your tarmac, phantoms,
walker,
your guiding hedgerows, mirage:
now mark the pathways and prayerways,
stoneways and cattleways,
          the battle ways
of the valley's cauldron.
They live under me,
blood corned
like every English field.