Quarrying

rock is earth's bone: expose it,
cut, drill and blast it, crush it,
in a gash of hillside;

earth is patient of such excision,
generous to a cracked fault,
in its opencast dustbowl

of terraced crags, for truck and digger,
the unrelenting stink, smoke and gun-rattle
of rock being rendered down;

from its profit, 'industry', 'manufacture'
are words still not yet quite obsolete,
to hard heads under hard hats:

always to produce more, more quickly,
lorries ply, grind gears, pound the roads,
laid from their own aggregates

but from rock's first solemn raising
for stone-circle, barrow, dolmnen,
through its local quarrying

- a layer of dust on every window-ledge -
of limestone or gritstone, cut and dressed
for church and homestead,

or for millstones, outsize roof-tiles, and the stripped
heavy handwork of drystone walls,
there's always still some turning point

of risk without security,
and a term set for quarry and quarryman,
heading for the spoil-heap -

until the quarry, abandoned, will at last grow over,
a natural reserve, shallow-soiled,
host for a while to rarest orchids

© Alec Rapkin