Dry stone walls
Harsh as the dialect, hewn from millstone grit
or limestone they piece and parcel-out the shires.
Wind-fingers probe between stones' ill-fit
Moss-sodden, lush, under dripping birches,
or pale as a picked bone, isled with lichen,
they stride up flanks of fells, true to contour.
The sinuous mass and loom and sweep of them
bars the land like silent sentries, grim and dour.
Some mammoth greed conceived this lift and haul
heft and shift of a task, that bewilders,
humbles us, such toil and craft in each wall.
Sack-draped backs hunched under drench of centuries,
men and stone, bent to deny, heaved like moles,
to shape these monumental barriers.
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