Saint Michael’s Mount, at Morning, by Bill Arnott

St. Michael's Mount, Penzance, UK, by Bill Arnott (Canada) contemporary

Saint Michael’s Mount, at Morning

A fan of folded sunlight skeins through towered parapets
five fingers splayed in morning rays gleam gold on battlements
a wave of shoreline cobbles damp in toasted almond sand
they dance like finely jewelled hands in stony dusted bands

We climb a path of basalt, carved in shallow sea-washed burls
underneath four granite flagstones, next to samphire swirls
where bands of Benedictine brothers rest, long buried in bog barrows
swallows swoop with rooks as choughs sing psalms with hooded sparrows

A distant beam of light shines down, where Michael slew the dragon
the hill an ancient salt path where the pilgrims rode their wagons
to the port across the hillock and a place they called Land’s End
while the next stop was Gibraltar, what the caliphates defend

Apart from when the clergymen came through to claim the grail
as Crusaders chose a line of rose to stake as their own trail
leading on beyond the dawn, a path of solar means
a place where Celts and Saxons felt lay north of Aberdeen

To the frozen isle of Thule, misty isle where Grecians sailed
Iberians, Phoenicians too, and clerics were assailed
the rock was found by Vikings and two ravens through the fog
as a circle was completed with the monks submerged in bog

Bill Arnott
​
Bill Arnott is the bestselling author of the Gone Viking travelogues and A Season on Vancouver Island. When not trekking with a small pack and journal, Bill can be found on Canada’s west coast, where he lives near the sea on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land.