Cornwall

There are a few poems which touch me personally, and occasionally I come across one which strikes like a knife through unguarded armour – unexpectedly and poignantly. Three Lunulae, Truro Museum.

I saw one the other day, about thin gold and the faded trappings of a distant age, about a diminishing people holding on grimly to the smallest remnants of old power, the Lady in three aspects. I saw in a postcard the captured image of something that very soon would be nothing more than image; I saw in the threat of a spider something perhaps lethal but mostly to be ignored. And over it all, the patina, the dust of ages, suffocating the ghosts that remained in a dark museum in Truro.

Three moons, one Lady. Brittany, Cornwall, Wales; lost lands which were once Britain and the root of the Matter of Britain. When a nation has this kind of history, it is possible to fill it with tangled things and texts and aching eyes – and dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, as Chesterton says.

You can only see the matter properly if the web is approached by its many strands – archaeology as science, myth, legend, history, sociology; poetry as elegy, memorial, photograph, tapestry; jewellery as totem, token, emblem of what is gone and what might yet be again one day.

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Three Lunulae, Truro Museum
by Penelope Shuttle

Gold so thin,
only an old woman
would notice its weight

Crescent moons of gold
from the sunken district
of the dark,
out of the archaeologist's earth

The women of the lunulae
threw no barbaric shadows
yet a vivid dance
lit up their bones

I sense the mood
of many women
who wore the new moon
like a necklace

They have got over
the winter
while I still freeze

The slight quick tap
of a clock
goes on
like the rhythm
of an insect's leg
in the grass

I linger
in the locked room
of the gold,

trying to see,
beyond the sickle shapes,
the faces of three women

Sharp shadows breathe hard,
shedding skins like dusty snakes
Light twists in a violent retching

For an instant
there is the fragment of a lip,
an eyebrow fine as a spider's threat

A face like a frost fern

The custodian
locks the lunulae
in the safe once more

Cornish, they are,
he says,
dug up at St Juliot,
regalia of this soil,
and not for the British Museum

You buy me
a postcard of the lunulae
and we leave the museum,
enter the thin gold remains
of autumn