Time on Time
Here in Yarnbury Camp, said the man, his shadow falling across us sunned and silent, they dug up a Roman soldier.
complete with all his gear they found him, even to the rivets, brass-bronze, I should say – that fastened his leather sandals.
I’m interested in these things myself, whenever I come here I make a special point of looking in all the rabbit-holes.
He paused a little, and went; and after him came the Roman. shadowless stepping the turf that hid him unsunned and silent,
here in Yarnbury Camp, saying, we dug up a Briton, buried with all his goods, his worked flints and his amber.
Mortality is a strange thing, I muse and ponder about it as I stand here on my watch, so still that at dusk the coneys nibble the grass at my feet, heeding me no more than a dead man.
I looked at your wrist, at the transient flesh and the bone beneath it, and time bound dancing there with a viper’s-tongue flicker.
To that coranto, I thought, north-east of us the shadows of Stonehenge veer onward into another evening.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1937