Stane

at ‘Mary’s Steid Stane’, Dalbeattie

by Robin Leiper

Stones we take as tokens of the real ─ how 
cold, unyielding, true. As Dr Johnson when 
he kicked his pebble ─ “thus!” ─ in refutation. 

And this one… a bit big to kick, although you’d 
have to find it first, hidden here behind the hedge 
in a litter-strewn lay-bye near our work-a-day wee town. 

Squeeze through the narrow gap ─ that crack in reality, 
the portal, back of the wardrobe, rabbit-hole. Kick it  
if you thought, at first, that stories were not real. 

No sign or explanatory plaque but no question, 
it’s brute fact ─ a three-foot cube of granite ─ and handy 
to take a seat or mount a horse. But what horse? Well, 

that’s obvious also, in its way ─ the way we tell 
our tales, lying here in the realm of myth, parallel  
to the track of a history, you only kind-of know. 

You reach out and touch it, for it touches you. 
Here is the legend realised ─ a Queen, beauty 
betrayed, loss, a leaving never-to-return. And 

everyone believes that they’ve lived this, one way 
or another. A story that lies buried in the Land’s bones, 
work-a-day or not, the leaving, and it takes a stone 

and a lie to tell it.