Saturday 22 September 2012

Leaving Orkney

Left overs?
welcome to the darkness of Wideford Hill

(notes from the Tomb of the Eagles and scrabbling about in the mud of Wideford Hill Cairn)


To be chosen to lie
In bone on stone
For generations,
Was that the honour,
A privileged obligation?
To wait down the centuries
Bound in stone,
Questioned, petitioned,
Left behind until,
I arrive with a metal light
And listen for your whisper in
The broken dark

Or did a freedom in death
Wait for the flaying
By eagles,
A used skull picked clean
And tumbled off the cliff edge,
Into the sea
And a freedom of soul along the wind,
On the wave,
A chance to turn and run again
In fur, in feather, in family skin?
step out of the Cairn and into a wider landscape



Leaving Orkney
How to write this horizon
That sweeps from blue and shining white clouds
Into rain drifting over 
A bleak shuttered house on 
A bleak stone-walled headland and 
Then out into light again, 
Sunlight reflecting grey and silver on a rippling sea and 
Back into distant rain, 
Shifting curtains beyond those quicksilver waves.
Standing on the sighing deck
Watching our wake curve across the waves
And fade.


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