For a long time now I have wanted to write a poem about the stacks of rock that occasionally dot the coastlines I remember visiting on holidays in Cornwall and Scotland as a child. I thank Andy Townend https://wordpress.com/read/post/id/20274240/1605 for posing this, at first, seemingly impossible prompt (my first thought was to try to do something about computer programming queues and stacks) and for eventually reminding of the other geological meaning of the word. Geology, politics and language have always been closely bound up together in the way I see our world and the way I attempt to express it in verse.

Stack

The soft limestone is worn away by acid,

as uplifted igneous rock resists,

bridging coastal tides.

Thinned by wind and rain,

it collapses under its own levity and gravity,

leaving us an off-shore stack of granite—

an imagined castle,

noble and lost.