Poem for Monday and Monasterboice

Delusion Of Saints 

By Robinson Jeffers 

The old pagan burials, uninscribed rock,

Secret-keeping mounds,

Have shed the feeble delusions that built them,

They stand inhumanly

Clean and massive; they have lost their priests.

But the cross-bearing stones

Still foot corruption, and their faces carved

With hopes and terrors

At length too savagely annulled to be left

Even ridiculous.

Long-suffering saints, flamelike aspirers,

You have won your reward:

You sleep now as easily as any dead murderer

Or worn-out lecher.

To have found your faith a liar is no thorn

In the narrow beds,

Nor laughter of unfriends nor rumor of the ruinous

Churches will reach you.

As at Clonmacnoise I saw them all ruined,

And at Cong, at Glendalough,

At Monasterboice; and at Kilrnacduagh

All ruined, all roofless

But the great cyclopean-stoned spire

That leans toward its fall.

A place perfectly abandoned of life,

Except that we heard

One old horse neighing across the stone hedges

In the flooded fields.

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After a morning of laundry, the only excitement of my Monday was an ophthalmologist appointment. None of my post-glaucoma surgery follow-ups has really been reassuring; he hasn't found anything obviously wrong, but each time there's been something weird enough that he wants me back in 4-6 weeks to see if it's changed, and this time it's something that might essentially be an eye pimple or might be something more ominous, which he can't tell without a more complicated scan that he doesn't want to do unless it grows, so they're going to look at it again in a month. 

Otherwise, I walked to the beach, I watched some more Derry Girls with Cheryl, I watched the end of the Ravens victory over the Buccaneers, and now we're watching the season premiere of What We Do in the Shadows, which I have missed. Here are some photos from Monasterboice in County Louth, a monastery founded around the year 521, though the earliest surviving buildings -- the high crosses and round tower -- date from the 10th century, when it was occupied by Vikings, and whose graveyard has victims of the Great Famine and people who died in the past decade: