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.