Find me a place where stories have grown old,
and wound about the lands where they were told
in other times so that they seem as one
with all that lies beneath a foreign sun,
like vines that grow on warm and weathered stones
or veins that stretch about their living bones.

Or lie to me and say this is that place
and in that story you and I will trace
the past that never was, so that this seems
a land where tales have been told (and dreams
have passed) without a break from distant ages,
written to survive their yellowed pages.

But when this is a place where stories dwell
we might recall that others used to tell
their tales: embers rose to light the sky
above the lands where they would live and die,
here between the mountains and the seas,
and words curled round the rivers and the trees.

All are lost – but we may glimpse their ghosts
at times, flitting round the lonely coasts,
in mountain gorges, when we know to look,
or call them from the pages of a book
which gathers fragments like it gathered sherds
to recreate a world of missing words,

as if the land held pasts that it has known,
inviting us to write it with our own.
They’ll rise for a moment, mute and wan,
– they’ll reach to us, uncertain, and be gone
before we know an individual face.
words no longer hold them in this place.