What issues from dark stones on bright days
Is mechanically sinuous.
Each evolving movement,
The visual counterpart of a rotational click,
Is a snake
And more than an adder –
A multiplication sum of zigzag lines
And a symbol of the landscape’s potential
In terms of what we fear by broad daylight.


We may be struck
By the darker uncertainties of night
But this directly amazes,
Is an unbroken link
Between sun and rocks,
Gleaming.


What suns have generated
On a bare planet –
Life –
Comes rippling towards us
Containing its own death.
It makes multiplying pointless
And significant
Simultaneously
Because truth is a direct line to our own destruction
Forged by the glittering chains
Of such bright days.


Alasdair Aston