Holme, Norfolk; July 28th, 1998

                                                

The low spring tide's at ten past ten;

Don't miss it - it will never come again.

The light of the full moon clings to your feet and stinks.  

It’s an hour’s soft plod through sweet sublunar mud
Down to the henge, there at the turn of the tide:
A circle, twenty feet across, of fifty-five split oak trunks,

Inward facing, sunk deep and shrunk to a low
Unmoving ring of patient, wizened elves
Around a shallow pool - spectators who dedicated themselves
To long-form entertainment four thousand years ago.  

Then they were a stockade ten feet tall;  an outer ring 
For Club-Foot John, the one-legg’d slow-motion target-diving devil,
To spot as he dropped from the upper sky, his fall scheduled
To take five thousand years.   But this was no climate for loitering.  

As the sea rose, his imperceptible downward crawl

Became an imperceptible rush for safety.   The creature
Watched his blank become a wink, a tidal feature,
And adjusted the aerodynamics of his fall

To make a headlong dive.   When his terrified fingers 
Touched the surface of the pool - 1912’s
The date recorded by the watchful elves - 
The cheer was so profound the echo lingers

And returns at these deep tides.   His fall goes on.  
Now John is an inverted oak.   The root, cut flat like an anvil,
Juts from the middle of the pool - it’s the diving devil
’s club foot.   In thirty years it will be gone;

John will be lost under the sand, under the sea,
But tonight he’s here.   And so are we.