journal for new poetry
Timothy Donnelly
Heritage
For the symbolic structures which made sense of the monuments have rotted away –Mark Fisher
Off to Stonehenge by myself on a coach filled with others,
couples and families with school-age children, the tour guide
indefatigable as steak and kidney pie, my Marks & Spencer
chicken vindaloo sandwich nibbled on in the shadows (no food or
drink allowed on board), two canned G&T before a shallow doze
against the window to the burble of my confreres’ deep-cut
Harry Potter trivia, a quick stop in Lacock—idyllic shooting location
for two out of eight Harry Potter movies and as many episodes
of Downton Abbey, as well as for that series’ full-length
release in which the town’s historic streets stand in for those
veining the titular (unreal) village through which George V and Mary
parade royally in a big-budget set piece featuring 350 extras
in period dress, 80 soldiers on horseback (actual soldiers, the horses
borrowed from Buckingham Palace’s King’s Troop), and one
modest royal carriage not wholly incomparable to our own luxury vehicle
whose claret plush with azure speckles we return to undiminished
by the muchness as we zag through the chilly alkaline grassland
used for military training now, sundown approaching as we climb
in silence to the stones, where for lack of any better idea we pose
one by one in front of them like the Night King from Game of Thrones.