Dry Stone (County Galway)

The soft ditches and hedgerows give way

    as you drive west.

Until you reach Connemara

where plots of land are divided

by improbable walls

that defy the laws of gravity.

They have no foundations, nor mortar

    to hold them together

yet have stood for thousands of years

    and will stand for thousands more.

They make for good neighbours.

    Keep one man’s sheep

from another man’s field.

From the air they look like worn-down gums

from which the teeth

were extracted eons ago.

Rain hammers them with nails.

Wind scoops its fingers into the gaps

attempting to divide and conquer.

Light unrolls its bolts of pale cloth

    or upends a basket

of ragged scraps through the trees.

The early Christian Church

of the Gallarus Oratory

on the Dingle peninsula

was fashioned in the seventh century

    with dry-stone corbelling

by neolithic tomb builders.

This place of worship takes the shape

of an upturned boat.

Each stone’s laid at an angle
slightly lower on the outside

so the gales of fierce Atlantic storms

simply run off

and leave the inside bone dry.

Legend has it that if a true believer

climbs out of the oratory via the window

    his or her soul will be cleansed.

But the opening’s 18cm by 12.
The size for something smaller

and meeker than human.

A stone say

    to be passed through.

It seems such a waste.

When even the sun

in its bright collusion with clouds

to break into heaven with a chisel

has more initiative than stone.

But the sun sustains nothing that endures.

Not even itself.

It’s stone that will inherit the earth.

And when the earth and sun have gone

it will inherit the dark space that’s left.

Not that it frets nor gloats

over this legacy.

The whole argument

just like a storm off Gallarus Oratory

is so much water off a stone’s back.

Eternity only means something

if it doesn’t already exist.

                                        Judy Johnson