Stone Wall outside Yeats' Churchyard

If this wall isn’t old, it could be, settled and filmed over with green algae, mottled with the white concentric growth of fungus. Who knows if the growth was there before, or since, the building of the wall. The rocks have come to fit together like old spouses, his lumps molded to her hollows, but even when new, the thoughtful eye and hand of the builder would have been evident - where’s a small chink for this small space, ah! there! a place for that big cube! And the wall grew up like a 20th Century art lesson, balance, form, and abstraction. There must have been some failures sometimes, sections surely collapsed in rain or in the shudder of the wind, to be repaired by yet other hands, other eyes, and maybe that’s why there’s a juxtaposition of green rock stark against white. And maybe it was less tall, once, and hence the strata, here a layer thick, built by someone young and hardy, here a thin line of hearthstones, almost. Over the top, some prickly vine creeps down, and if the stonework holds, it will one day disappear under greenery, and become as if a hedge. All the walls of Ireland are like this: organic, living, speaking their story and of the hands that built them.