Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Stanza Stones: the Poetry Trail

What if you were hiking your favorite trail and found poetry?  Beautiful words carved into rock ... verbal petroglyphs for the future.

My blog friend Maureen at Writing without Paper, is a fountain of inspiring information and this week she came up with Simon Armitage's "Stanza Stones."  This is a project to create seven poems carved in stones and placed in locations which follow the Pennine watershed, which is sometimes called the "backbone of England."  Each poem is related to water and here is "Snow."

The sky has delivered its blank missive. The moor in coma. 

Snow, like water asleep, a coded muteness to baffle all noise, to stall movement, still time. 

What can it mean that colourless water can dream such depth of white? 
We should make the most of the light. Stars snag on its crystal points. 
The odd, unnatural pheasant struts and slides. 
Snow, snow, snow is how the snow speaks, is how its clean page reads. 
Then it wakes, and thaws, and weeps.
 Here is more about this inspiring project

1 comment:

  1. This is such a wonderful project. I was thinking how cool it would be if someone did something similar along our Appalachian Trail, which stretches from the South all the way to Maine.

    Thank you for the kind mention.

    ReplyDelete