1.Ravie Hill
As well as being real rock, sea and soil,
– well, what place isn’t, unless landlocked,
and we’d laugh at our father, so loyal
to the mighty cliffs and modest crofts,
the wind-worn hills and tireless toil
of ancestors (just to keep warm, we scoffed)
and pleaded to fly home: even the locals
call you incomer, Dad, get with the plot –
Orkney has become an imaginary
archipelago in a sea of texts.
Today, Hild and Mans greet me as neighbours,
Suki sulks over his lost dian stane and Magnus
succumbs at last to his saviour complex
while I, snug by the fire, draw from your library.
(The italicised quote is from Simon Hall’s book ‘The History of Orkney Literature‘.)
2. The Broch of Gurness
Low-lying mirror of fast-changing skies,
pounded, beaten, broken, yet lapped at too
and loved. At Aikerness, where a scythe
of coral sand curves between bere and blue,
we comb the beach for groaty-buckies
those pink-flushed fingertips
fine-grooved and fragile. Swelkies
whip the sea into a pack of ridgebacks,
fierce and impassable, while
a slow swell rises to meet them,
as fear-flushed and fragile as what we’ve always sought,
as sure as our successes: bannocks, broch, safe passage.