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allegiances

It feels like one of the old days of freedom. The tide is high, the loch is wide, rippled and blue, with fat flecks of foam drifting slowly, unrestricted, across its surface. They’re being driven outward by the freshwater currents of the two rivers which run into this loch and by the cool easterly breeze but they look as if they’re being driven by the sun, which rides already high in the east-south-east behind them, backlighting them and seeming to propel them towards me.

It’s the first time we’ve seen the sun in days and, as the foam slides by, it continues its steady rise, presiding over the clear blue waters and skies with confident assurance. And its easy assertion, its potent presence reminds me, in good order, that we are only truly ruled by this sun: by its presence and absence, its warmth and light, and by the dynamic streams of air and water it generates across the Earth – our rotating, fecund Earth, which nourishes us in turn. This is where our allegiances belong: to our star, to our planet, and to our right to roam it, as we long to and as we must.

Lochinver harbour, Assynt, Scotland
1st April 2021

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Balchladich beach in a south-westerly gale

The green wave curls,
the white wave smashes,
the cream banks of foam quiver on the sand
then scatter up into the wind like bursts of hysterical laughter.

The whole foreshore is a seething plain of froth
with gulls drifting high above it,
appearing to just hang in the sky
like the long banks of cloud laid out, unmoving, overhead.

In the south, the mountains, striated with snow,
hold themselves up like a frozen wave –
a suspended crest,
a momentary stoppage –

and I wonder how we can continue,
the sky so still,
the sea so live,
the earth so static.

Balchladich, Assynt, Scotland
23rd March 2021

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apocalypse

It was like a sun from another universe. Wreathed and shrouded in finely-spun fibres of cloud, it hung low over the western horizon just north of the brown humps of Soyea. The cloud cradling it was a deep purplish rose but the hue of the sun itself was hard to describe. Not orange, nor yellow, nor even gold, it was a colour from another world, and its texture too seemed of a softness too fine to be from ours.

I stood at the shore and watched it, this very gentle apocalypse happening somewhere else, and all the while a strange ache grew in my breast – a sense of things I couldn’t reach for,  of distance without end. Meanwhile at my feet, the sea just kept sighing: surge, retreat; surge, retreat; surge, retreat.

Aird Ghlas, Loch Inver, Assynt, Scotland
19th March 2021

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notes on a head injury (3)

Writing is one of the things keeping me sane. With my words, I’m weaving a home for myself. In an increasingly ugly social world, I’m trying to make myself a shelter, a hidden place to heal.

A nest, a cocoon. A chrysalis. I discovered recently that some caterpillars turning into butterflies partially liquefy in their chrysalises, that they don’t just morph from crawling caterpillar to winged creature but return to primordial slime in between: holometaboly, a true transformation.

I’m thankful I haven’t turned to slime, or been reduced to a vegetable, by this bash on the head but I have subjectively entered a more fluid state. Reality feels much stranger, with my shrunken sphere of memory, and my sense of myself is dissolving. I can only hope that my imaginal discs – containing the proto-structures for the form that will follow – remain intact. In some butterfly species, future body parts covertly take shape even in the caterpillar’s early life. Perhaps the ideas that my mind will coalesce around in future are already in development.

It’s hard to tell though. It’s hard to tell anything these days. There’s been so much discontinuity – in my mind, in my life, in the locked-down, vaccine-pushing world around me – it’s hard to keep track. Hopefully, like the metamorphosed butterfly, when I emerge I’ll retain some memory of the time before. For now, I have to bide my time, and remind myself that, although the human world is in disarray, the rest of the natural world is just carrying on. This time of retreat is temporary.

As my eight-year-old self once wrote*,
‘When I come back out again
I’ll hear the birdie’s song’.

Indeed.

*From my first published poem,’The Butterfly in a Chrysalis’, which I recently came across in an old copy of my primary school’s annual magazine.

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
14th March 2021

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snow envy

a few flakes
         fall
       futilely,
fleetingly
                     and
   unflurriedly
        like
    fickle
            floating
        fluff

10th February 2021
Cwm Garw, Glamorgan, South Wales