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Watcher in the Mist
The morning lay hushed in a mantle of grey,
Where silence had gathered and chosen to stay.
The grasses bent low with the weight of the night,
And time seemed suspended, withdrawn from its flight.
The quarry lay broken, its bones put to rest,
Stone carved by hard hands, now reclaimed by the west.
Its echoes of labour had drifted away,
Yet whispers still haunted where shadows now play.
The fog curled like incense and clung to the air,
It softened the ridges and made them seem fair.
A fragrance of iron, of peat, and of rain,
Breathed stories of sorrow the stones still retain.
And there, from the rubble, so quiet, so near,
A ewe raised her head through the stillness severe.
Her eyes held the moorland, its frost and its fire —
A keeper of silence, of toil, and desire.
No bleat did she utter, no rustle of tread,
Just statuesque calm where the quarry lay dead.
The frost on her fleece caught the light’s fleeting thread,
As if she were shaped from the hands of the dead.
The hills, half-forgotten, were veiled in shrouds,
The sky opened slowly with a parting of clouds.
A crow gave its sermon, a bell without tongue,
And morning grew solemn, unspoken, unsung.
I breathed in the moment — cold stone and retreat,
The tang of the earth and the bracken’s defeat.
A stillness so sacred, so vast, and so deep,
It entered my spirit; it taught me to weep.
For Fecit End Delf bears the weight of the past,
Where labour and silence are fused to the last.
Though sheep roam its scars and green creeps through the cold,
Its wounds are still etched in the iron and old.
The ewe bowed her head, and the fog drew its veil,
The silence returned like the end of a tale.
And I, just a passerby, stood caught in the grey,
Unsure if she’d met me, or drifted away.
A sentinel spirit, or creature of stone —
I left with a silence that entered my own.