Standing Stones at Callanish

From the Writer's Almanac for today:-

"The Stones at Callanish" by Roger Mitchell. Copyright from The University of Akron Press.

A boarded-up hotel beside a fishing pier, a pub.

Above them both, a church crouched on a hill. Whoever brought

Christ to this desolate coast did it

with sword and fire, and it's not clear today

whether it took, or whether the slow seep

of centuries, the long winter nights,

would ever let anything be that wasn't

as sullen as the hill. The village

is that way, too. When you step outside,

there it is, the universe, all of it,

the glare of it pure, God's unshaven face

so close your skin rasps. Whoever raised

the stones did a good job of vanishing, too,

though the longer I stand here, the more

it seems it was deeper into the genes

they went, not just into the air.