Skirrid Fawr  Oil on panel.

Sky Burial: Skirrid Fawr   Graham Hartill

At the end of the Shining Path, along the ridgeback,
there is a sharper rise to the peak. The falling fields
were misty, the ridge was yellow and a pair of crows
were perched ahead of us as black and big as vultures.


They took off. The last time they came here there was
thin ring of ashes around the pinnacle; we ate a picnic,
and I was absent-mindedly fingering them before I real-
ised what they were. By then they had mostly filtered
into the turf. The shuddering blue of a tilted beetle
clambering over the grasses; a thick, red, lazy erecting
bull.


It feels like a place for an Autumn sky burial, meaning a
wide sculpture of time and material: a curling cloak of
blondish grass; a bull’s breast stuffed full with feathers; a
crown of ashes.


*

Woodpecker, if you are anywhere near, nail me a
house, and everybody bring up stones, as if to a cairn,
to hold a shape against the brain’s dissolving.


The fields spread out to the bluff and the eyes revolve;
patterns of rock and cloud and hand that fall again to a
different colour.

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