We are where the mainland turns.
We've sheltered in the past.
Now we sail to meet it.
The journey back starts from one coast
and moves down the Glen's scar.
We end where we begin.
At the Salt Road of the Eastern Firth.
On a false isle with two bridges, one of water.
Flung as slat is flung.
A skimmer over inland water in a curragh
made of leather, timber, hazel-rod and twine.
Diggeen to another coast again
through layers of sediment and time.
Through stones of lime and sand.
Down West.
Our curragh burling like a key,
the prophecy, that boats would sail around the fairy hills bend.
When building a canal, you start at the beginning and the end,
it all came true.
The sea had taken many elsewhere.
We had to learn to sail through land.
We dug.
Our shovels hit the mud.
We saw our faces in the monstrous water.
Keeling at the bow.
Columba prays for them and us.
We have seen
the short seas of Loch Ness froth.
It's like an industry was moving
underneath its skin.
Hear the Navy's hammer split.
A railway line, an Ammonite.
two bridges, one of stone.
The asteroid of the Minch is overhead
and deep.
Herring girls are singing.
Echoes through the rigging.
But there is no return.
Our current closes on the Salt Road.
We have sheltered long in the past.
Now, we sail to open it.
Wake to a horizon outwith land.
Opening to the Sea Loch, to Caledonia's
scar, to where we've always been.
Where the mainland turns.
[In Gaelic] Listen. The slush of stories on the stones,
myths in the freeze-crack of the shore;
the imagination heaving,
a St Kildan mailship on the sea.
Stories emerging on each high tide.
Once upon a time there were marvels
in every river and gush and stac;
monsters of geo and tide, horrors smothered –
then marked on the map.
A waterhorse on the shore of Loch an Dùin.
Handsome. Sinewed. Uncanny.
Under the loch a tunnel of bones –
his hide waxy, like ambergris, like aspic.
There’s a Hag who scours her blanket
in the spin-and-rinse of Corryvreckan:
the country left spick under the snow,
with bubbles of Tìr nan Òg in the foam.
History lurks behind each myth
carried by migrants, merchants and wanderers;
the world is always a-ferrying
with a gift in every storm.
Sea-currents are a bridge
between Samarkand, Skail and the Storr
that brought over silver dirhams
elegant verses from the Quran on their edges:
Molucca beans come from the Caribbean,
that will charm against evil eyes;
with no look back new Columbas
will bring other heavens in their books.
O those murmured undercurrents of history:
blue men of the Minch duelling with stories,
and selkies singing in the dawn
on the ricked-rocks of Sule Skerry. Listen.
There’s a moment at the slack of the tide
where all falls equal
between ebb and flood,
sigh and breath, where I believe
we might start over again —
a chance in time to tell it right,
tell it backwards if we could.
From the outset, we’d apologise
then get to work. Imagine it;
every wave a homecoming
for all we’d lost at sea,
now returned to the foreshore;
an armful of herring-lasses laughter,
the hulls of wind-battered boats
come back whole and seaworthy
from the throats of storms.
Oil dissolves from oil-sullied water;
the cormorant beats unburdened wings
the rain goose swallows her prophecies of doom.
We’d stare opened-mouthed as glaciers grew
back their skin, and every old story,
every lost memory of who we were,
we’d gather up, a gift
from the deep, warm in our palm.
We’d go to the shoreline and dig
for long-sunken words
and put them back inside our mouths;
all salt and iron, a new-old weight
upon our tongues.
We’d learn
to speak the language of the tides again,
and listen for the whalesong in the artey
of the gulf, we’d long-forgotten
was pulsing in us too.
Imagine
we could take it back,
what was lost
and what was shattered.
There’s a moment at the slack of the tide,
where all falls equal;
a tear in time
where we might start over —
but no one rows against the tides of time.
When the ebbtide comes,
we’ll apologise,
and get to work.