GILLIAN CLARKE

Selected poems

Sheep's skulls

The bone is thin as paper

Inside the skull, scrolled on shadow.

Its dreams evaporated

On a warm bank over the drovers' road

To Capel Cynon.

We sought skulls like mushrooms,

Uncertainly white at a distance,

Skulls of sheep, rabbit, bird,

Beautiful as a leaf's skeleton

Or derelict shell.

Where sheep shelter inside stone

Cottages, graze the floor clean, stare

From the window spaces. They die

On the open hill, and raven and buzzard

Come like women to clean them.

The skull's caves are secretive.

The crazed bone, sometimes translucent

As vellum, sometimes shawled

To lace, no longer knocks with the heart's bell

To the lamb in the womb.

A spider wraps it in a tress

Of silk, a cloth of light. On the rose

Patina of old wood it lies

Ornamental in the reflection

Of a jar of wheat stalks.