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)