Although I felt as if I ought to, for quite a while I didn’t write anything at all, save for a few roughed-out splinters of lines. If I wanted to make this sound plausibly and artistically dignified I guess I could imply a kind of sub-conscious working-through of everything I’d seen and heard about the stone. Whilst that may be true, it might equally be true that I was simply and rather more prosaically waiting for something to happen. Eventually it did.
These were going to be public poems, and I decided to use rhyme and rhythm, because often rhyme and rhythm can smooth the path between the poem and reader, especially a reader not ‘expecting’ a poem. I left out the punctuation at the end of the lines because, well, that’s the way it is with signposts.
- cj allen
Sign
Before the stone
before the land
the running hare
the pointing hand
the rattled wheel
the bright idea
something else
would lead us here
grid reference SK 26276 74695
This
Companion Stone
Other
Companion Stones
Other
Guide Stoops
Site numbering
taken from
Howard Smith's
Guide Stoops
of Derbyshire