journal for new poetry
Stewart Sanderson
The Camel
Drumcliffe Monastery, County Sligo
Facing westwards, the camel
if indeed it is
a camel, watches
the cars as they hurtle by
beyond the vallum:
a millennium
at least it has been waiting
in the rain out here
as fresh worlds appear
before it, chiselled on this
cross by an artist
who might have noticed
its like on a long journey
to the Bible lands –
a sight which his hands
remembered, or more likely
extrapolated
from an image he’d
happened upon one day
in a manuscript
which image then slipped
onto this sandstone pillar
abstracted slightly
as the rich must be
perhaps, to enter heaven:
a camel which could
unravel, a flood
of interlacing knotwork,
to spool like a sigh
through some needle’s eye.