Fortified For Faithfulness

(Poem by Knucklas Castle Poet, Tony Walton)
Written for the launch of the Knucklas Castle Community Land Project

On the green-mantled hill, no stone still stands
of this lonely Border outpost: at most
turfed stumps and scattered broken teeth.
Time has swallowed Knucklas Castle.
Mortimer’s lands are in our hands
now, and for long generations
yet to come, if we can safe-keep places
such as this, sacred spaces, to leave them.

Go back a thousand years and more before
a baron’s garrison kept watch into
encroaching hills, in alternating
boredom and high anxiety;
go back to when protection was
mostly for a good life lived well;
and tell me that we cannot recapture
communality and simple rapture.

Go back further still: a thousand years more,
to when this was a place of pilgrimage
and holy high observation
of spiritual priorities
that guarded us and guided us
along our proper path of life:
long time before the times of want and strife;
when this hill with Wisdom provided us
and nothing from the Truth divided us.

Tony Walton
(March 2009)

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Tony has published three books of poetry in his sequence SEASONS OF THE HEART.