Innis - by
To give full, gull-throated voice to these islands –
these woven creel archipelagos and proud stacs,
stepping stones to themselves, word-stores,
crucibles and memory bridges, these hieroglyphs of gneiss,
Place: Highlands & Islands
Landscape and I - by
Landscape and I get on together well.Though I’m the talkative one, still he can tellHis symptoms of being to me, the way a shellMurmurs of oceans.Loch Rannoch lapses dimpling in the sun.Its hieroglyphs of light fade one by oneBut re-create themselves, their message done,For ever and ever.That sprinkling lark jerked upward in the blueWill daze […]
Old Highland woman - by
She sits all day by the fire.How long is it since she opened the doorand stepped outside, confusingthe scuffling hens and the colliedreaming of sheep?Her walking days are over. She has come through centuriesof Gaelic labour and lovesand rainy funerals. Her peopleare assembled in her bones.She’s their summation. Before her timehas almost no meaning. When […]
Iona in Lacrimis - by
The saints are crying in the wind, can’t you hear them?Only the cries of the wing borne sing out,oystercatcher, skylark, ploverand corncrake. This too may be an answer.The saints are letting their tears fall, a gentle cascadeof green marble, don’t you hear them clatter together?Only the sound of the surf in the shingle, and the […]
The Lightkeeper’s Ghost, Eilean Mòr - by
He sings full beam –clear to the Ocean of Storms and shoalsof stars from undersongs, shiveringconstellations – lythe, saithe and sandeel.In the small hours inner reflections turnwith the mirrored lens, gannets splinter,glance off waves of prismatic glass.His psalmody voices sway and swell,the guillemot’s tremulous hi riri o, his tongue is silvered, shattered surf,coruscating puirt à […]
Da Clearance - by
I can see da rüfs aa taekit, an da hens aroond da door;
Fok kerryin twartree paets hame, an rigs delled every voar.
Èistibh - by
Feuch an tigeadh guth
tron t-sàmhchair.
Hoy Sound - by
Artist’s publication
Hoy Sound - by
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Prayer for My Father as a Child - by
In the house where he sleeps
let my ears
be the leaves at the window.
Strathconon - by
When you took the autumn to London
/ And left me to burrow into winter
/ I said they could pack up Strathconon
/ Box up…
Yesterday in Laggan - by
It was such a day
of sunshine wall to wall,
of heat haze and the year’s first frogs,
of blue hills stretching yonder.