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Rubha Rodha

book of poems open
across the Minch
the unfolded arms of Harris

Rubha Rodha, Loch Roe, Assynt, Scotland
7th April 2026

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afterwards

It always impresses me how bright the colour green is after snow. We’ve only had a week of snow cover, a fraction of the successive months I used to undergo in Quebec, yet as the grass reveals itself again it appears supernaturally viridian. The dullness of the day enhances the effect, the persistent rain and low grey cloud allowing the hues of the ground to come into their own, glowing with an inner luminance and seeming to rise out of the earth towards us.

I’ve loved having the snow. I’ve loved the simplicity and purity of the visual landscape and skyscape, the soft white carpet and laden charcoal-grey clouds completing each other in a quiet monochromatism. In Quebec, the snow stayed for so long that by February I would be longing for greenness, like a physical thirst. I don’t feel that now. Indeed, our snow spell has been all too brief. But something in me does feel relieved and enlivened—satiated—by the visible verdancy, the lurid green allure.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
11th January 2026

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downfall

I haven’t wanted the rain to come and wash away our lovely white blanket of snow, but it has its own beauty. The air is still and the raindrops pelt straight down in closely packed parallel lines which are unusually vertical. I stand at my caravan’s wide window and watch them, bouncing off the rounded sandstone copes on the wall or vanishing into the snow in front of me. Something about their straightness and linearity is very appealing, a change from the distracted, dancing drift of the snowflakes or the hard, angular momentum of the hail.

The sound is pleasing too, a precise patterning on the aluminium roof, gentler than the loud battering of the hail, more satisfying than the absent settling of the snow. The rain comes down directly, with thoroughness and vigour, and perhaps it’s that I’ve missed during these six days of snowy abandonment, when roads have been impassable, work delayed, and the world slowed and silenced.

The snow has been beautiful, soothing and serene, but it’s time now to move. It’s time now to wash our eyes and ears and step out.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
8th January 2026