At Glastonbury Abbey
The stones remember.
Their silence hums like bees in hidden cloisters
ancient prayers caught in lime and shadow.
The Abbey once rose to heaven’s height,
its spires gilded by the same sun
that now warms the backs of tourists
and the ivy crawling slow reclamation.
I walk where monks once moved in rhythm
the measured steps of devotion and duty.
Beneath my feet lie the buried echoes
of psalms and secrets,
of Abbot Whiting who would not bend his knee,
whose blood marked the path
to the Tor that still watches from above
a sentinel of myth,
its green shoulders cloaked in legend.
They say Arthur sleeps here,
that Joseph of Arimathea
planted his staff and it blossomed
faith rooted in Somerset soil.
Perhaps it’s only story.
But standing in the Abbot’s Kitchen,
round and hushed like a heart’s chamber,
I felt the air turn thick with something
not memory, not ghost,
but calling.
The Tor looks on, patient and knowing,
its shadow stretching toward the ruins
as though to bless what was broken.
Wind threads through archways
like voices learning again to sing.
And I, a traveler of aching bones,
feel strangely steady,
as though the ground beneath this holy wreckage
has whispered:
You are home.
