It was probably a day just like today
The day they brought him down from off the hill.
You can imagine how his knees stuck up wax-white
From the birch-branch litter whipped together
Out of the last tree that he ever cut
And his eyes that were so blue all gone into slush.
Just like today: clouds piled like dirty snow,
The hissing sun unseen that starts a burning in the sky,
The wind off the mountains taking the smoke,
And the blue bite of the river when the boys
Climbed down together to pull up a big stone for him
Bigger than he was anyway lying there.
So then they turned the holy man out of his cot
And made him come down to the chapel
Even though it was by now raining across the glen.
No one knew the prayers, not even the holy man,
Who couldn’t write his name it was so long ago
And so many dead already since the Spring.
But after they dug the hole and put the stone on him,
One of them came back the next day and the next
And since they couldn’t give him the axe to sleep with
Cut its shape instead deep in the granite stone
To show what his father had done and how he lived
No one knows when.
Marvels: the yew tree has been here
Four thousand years, and probably is really
The oldest tree in Europe. And a daft story tells
How a Roman envoy and his wife,
Touring up north of the border,
Stopped here because the baby was early,
And named it Pontius Pilate. Also
The mound is still there in the flat field
Where the old woman leading her white horse
Buried the whole village after the plague.
But better than all of these on a day like today
Is to stand in the churchyard by his stone
And hear him singing and the iron ring
Of his axe high in the woods in October.