Glastonbury, England: A Memory and an Old Photograph

What intrigued me most that windy day was she,

She who sat alone on a bench of stone on the top of Glastonbury Tor,

Who cared nothing for the tourists, or the tour, or the faint memory

Of Christian ruins on Celtic ground:

She was a bastion of meditative simplicity;

She was there to be there, and being there was to be.

In a crack, in a crevice of the old stone wall,

Centuries old and built and burned by monkish hands,

A modest flower bloomed, I don’t know the name, a small

Blue flower where no flower should have bloomed

In the chinks of boulders hauled bare-backed across twenty miles of open lands:

It cared nothing for history, or introspective philosophy;

It was there to be there, just being there was its benevolency.

I left both blossoming as I found them.

Jason Emerson is a poet and historian. He has published poems in about half a dozen journals, and is the compiler and editor of the book, Lincoln's Lover: Mary Lincoln in Poetry (Kent State University Press, 2018)