‘About what?’
MacQueen noticed it then – a fragment of red cloth in the hands of one of the vessel’s engineers as he made his way along the dock. Stained with oil and grime, he knew right away what had happened to the coat he had found in the gannet’s nest.
‘You forgot about it, didn’t you?’ he shouted, ‘A child – and you didn’t even do anything about it. Did you? Did you?’
Wrens
Like spume and spindrift, the pearls of wrens’ eggs
were found in the lower depths or ledges
of a cliff, not far from where shags and guillemots’ legs
stand till that hour they come to crack and shells
reveal these small birds that bear frail
notes, celebrating on each cleit and wall
their triumph at being born,
having survived these nights when stone and crags are torn
like shells below the cudgels of a storm.
Tree Sparrow
The tree sparrow must have landed there to sing
within the forest it believed was still standing
green and fruitful on the island’s cliffs;
these birches, rowans, willows now levelled below turf,
but still providing fuel for household fires,
their waterlogged trunks and branches drawn out of the mire
of dark peat to feed its constant flame.
But still that bird sang. Syllables and notes came
from its beak, that continual cheep and chirp
like the chip of these blades the people later gripped
when they were shipped off to the mainland,
the strangeness of their axes pulsating through their hands.
Castaway
1
No one knew from where the stranger came.
Washed upon the shoreline, his true name
was unknown. Yet content among our people,
he soon claimed
cliff-faces for his own, climbing crags in wind
or slashing rain.
Each crack now a footfall, he took the strain
of rope. Our words grew tame
upon his tongue, though the stumps of wings
jutting from the broad frame
of his shoulders showed the wife who shared his bed,
he never quite belonged.
2
He would look out for skeins of geese
as if their pulse of their wings might bring release
from his exile on that narrow slip of land,
Yet that longing might only last
a moment, passing swifter than their shadows,
for deep within, he could understand
That the way his heart and feet were tethered
for the likes of him was so much better
than
The shuddering of wings, the restlessness
his heart had not been fashioned
or created to withstand.
3
When he was dead,
we declared he was an angel,
one below the ranks of cherubim or seraphim,
who had come among us as a stranger,
like an albatross nesting among gannets
on the stac,
his broad and luminous back
a new, miraculous neighbour to our lives,
sharing, too, the burden of our labours,
and we were grateful, too, for his presence.
It seemed to give our existence
new breadth and dimension,
the meat he shared among us
granted greater savour
by the intensity of worship,
the whisper of his prayer.
The Death of the Last Great Auk
The last Great Auk ever found in Britain was killed by St Kildans, who believed its witchcraft was responsible for a particularly violent storm that struck the island.
And so we descended on it
– that strange bird –
and cried it for a witch:
as if its flightless wings
could summon up
the strength for storms;
as if head and beak could break
clouds free of their ledges
and bring rain tumbling
like eggs
shelled and shattered on these rocks.
A mistake, of course,
and when the flap was over
we looked down
into that great bird’s sightless eyes,
where could be read
our future –
black as nightfall,
boat slipping away in darkness
as it carried
the remnants of our race.
Smallpox Epidemic 1727–29
1
And we thought we were in danger
with seas snarling below us,
winds buffeting like gannets’ wings
while we tore their flesh for food.
And the cold that racked us
as fingers smashed at stone for shelter
was sharp as spume; a blitz of white
that stung us with each storm.
Hirta on the horizon during cloud
– yet when skies were clear,
Conachair sharp with sadness,
Oiseaval a clenched fist out of reach.
Where were the people
who had abandoned us –
the souls who had condemned us
to endless exile on this rock?
Yet when we had heard all they had suffered
– the scorching heat of fever –
we felt half-glad to have been stranded on that stac,
to have endured the chill
Of spring and winter on its stone
while they lacked strength to even dig
graves for those who were not there to greet us
when we returned to Village Bay.
2
He had the choice of two ends. Sudden death
or that feathered vest
he wore upon his chest,
that day spent hunting
with his father
on that stac out to the west.
It lifted him from danger, a take off
stirring and placing him
with Gabriel, Raphael, Ariel,
all the familiar angels
hovering in their hosts above them
stranded on that rock.
Not so his father, his feathers
damped and soaked by rain-clouds
became a shroud that downed him
till he was toppled from his heights
and found drowned
within the sea’s depths,
while Macarus ascended,
gaining lightness from the sun
glowing weakly above cloud,
granting strength to pinions
until his homeward flight was done.
Why Their Words Were Like Liquid…
Because salt air dampened consonants
and soaked and softened vowels.
Because all their cries crossed oceans,
resounding in the Bay of Fundy, Firth of Clyde.
Because seabirds lifted human speech
and plunged it deep in ocean.
Because fish could hear their whispers
bubbling in shoals.
Because their words were drowned in fear,
weighed down with children
swallowed prematurely by dark fathoms,
covered early by the earth.
Shags and Cormorants
After their boat had crashed and splintered on the rocks, Angus tried to think of new ways in which the islanders could catch fish. (The laird, after all, had said it was important for the future prosperity of the island.) After seeing pictures of some men from the Orient training cormorants to dip in and out of water, bearing their catch in their beaks, he decided he might train some native birds to behave in the same way, bring shoals to shore by
this method from the waters off Village Bay.
He wasn’t successful. The birds were all too eager to swallow the fish they had brought to the surface. Even the ring around their black throats could not stop them. Each mackerel and herring, each sprat and eel they managed to trap disappeared down their gullets. Spitting and shaking his head in disappointment, Angus had to admit defeat and let them go.
But there was some profit from his labour. The birds formed into a tight and disciplined unit that could often be seen gathered on the shoreline. They dipped and swam together, performing elegant, underwater ballet as they did so. Some have argued that an American saw them while visiting the island on his travels, giving him the idea for synchronised swimming.
And then came the day in the First World War when a German warship sailed into Village Bay. It fired off its great guns in the direction of the Feather Store, knocking some of its masonry. It was at that point the cormorants came together in a team, moving towards the vessel like dark torpedoes tracking through the water. Their heads drummed in unison against the steel hull of the vessel, rocking the nerves and feet of the crew in an explosion of sound.
‘Wie bitte?’
Unsure what had happened, they turned their boat away, never troubling the islanders again.
Love Story Accompanied by a
Chorus of Seabirds
/ Fior-ghaol
Gull
A blow to the head brought them together.
David was walking down Harbour Road when it happened – an angry gull sweeping down from its perch on the roof of the Masonic Lodge and smacking the back of his skull with its breast-feathers. The bird wheeled round and attacked him again, this time from the front. Its beak was open and screeching, its wings stretched and flared.
Amelia saved him from its attentions, running towards him with a copy of the Stornoway Gazette rolled up in her hand. She beat the attentions of the creature off with adverts and intimations, long detailed accounts of the local council and reports from the sheriff court. The gull retreated, fluttering away, unable to withstand the whack and force of all that verbiage.
Stunned and shaken, he asked her the one question that came to his mind as he stood there.
‘Would you fancy coming out for a drink with me?’
Puffin
Like clockwork, their hearts beat as they made love on the cliff-top.
‘400 times per minute,’ Amelia said, comparing the tremor of the excitement surging through them to the wing-beats of the puffins that flew above their heads, flapping furiously at the intrusion.
He smiled and nodded, holding her in his arms. His body, too, had taken flight upon that blanket, ignoring all the birds shrieking and crying in protest at their presence.
Yet, looking back, it was not only the rapid rhythm of their breathing he had noticed, the drumming of their hearts. He was conscious, too, of the colourful heads of the puffins, their doleful, tear-streaked eyes and comical beaks, the face-paint smeared upon their features by God or Nature.
He had an uneasy feeling that love was going to make a clown of him again.
Oyster-Catcher
His mother warned David about her, shaking her grey head sadly about how quickly they had moved in together, the sudden nature of their romance.
‘Bi glic…’ she said in Gaelic. ‘Be wise. Don’t rush into things like that. Take it easy. Don’t trust first impressions. They may not be all they seem.’
He had dismissed her words. ‘What did she know?’ Yet they had come back to him that evening, when they walked across the machair, disturbing a flock of oyster-casters with their approach.
‘Bi glic... Bi glic…’ they piped, repeating that phrase his fellow Gaelic–speakers had always heard in their cries. ‘Be wise… Be wise… Be wise…’
Fulmar
‘Dare you to climb the Mistress Stone,’ Amelia said arriving in Village Bay. ‘Prove how much you care.’
He laughed at his wild, fair-headed companion, so unlike the grim, Presbyterian family from which she came.
‘We’ll see…’
But when he reached that rock and saw how it framed sea and sky, how fulmars circled nearby, he faltered. He was supposed to tip-toe on a ledge to show he wished to marry her – a dizzy, precarious place.
‘Go on,’ she prompted.
He looked towards her, seeing for once her mother’s stern jaw, her father’s unflinching gaze.
‘No,’ he said.
Gannet
As they drained the last of the wine, Amelia began to talk about reincarnation,
‘I see myself as having been a swan in my past life,’ she declared.
‘I can see why,’ Brian nodded, his eyes watching the flow of her white dress, ignoring his partner, Alison by his side.
‘I was a gannet…’ David said.
‘Why do you think that?’ Alison asked.
‘I still see everything that goes on. At a moment’s notice, I can swoop down on any catch…’
Amelia trembled, knowing he had seen the hurried kiss that had passed between her and Brian in the kitchen earlier, when they were certain no one was around.
Cormorant
Full-breasted, wasp-waisted, long-legged, her slimness sheathed in a black swimsuit, Amelia dips and swirls within the pool, as if, like the cormorant she reminds him of, water is the element in which she truly belongs. She enjoys the turbulence and froth she creates, twisting round corners, surging down its length quickly, that sense, too, she has of disappearing below his gaze, rewarding David with a grin of pleasure, a dangerous gleam in her eyes. Perhaps that is why, he thinks, she kissed Brian that night. Perhaps that is why she loves the sea as it piles in, rack after rack after rack…
Tern
After they had cried and quarrelled,
after she had tried hard to deny
all that had occurred,
he walked alone on the shoreline
where a wheel of birds whirled
round him, with their endless screeches, skirls,
blows upon his cheek and forehead,
as their rage at his intrusion was unfurled,
yet no matter how blood flooded,
how world circled and spun,
their beaks never seemed to hurt him
half as much as she had done.
Guillemots Etc
Their days and nights were filled
with black/white arguments
like those guillemots and razorbills
that stood in terraced rows on cliffs
they walked alongside. Echoes of muttered growls
reverberating. Each prolonged sulk
a surly silence. Quarrels resounding hour by hour
till there was no escape from the murk
of shared misunderstandings. Except to fly.
Black-white. Black-white. Black-white.
Their tongues and fingers flapping
as beaks snapped out their final quarrel
before taking flight in flurries of sad and sore goodbyes.
A New Life / Beatha Ùr
Fireworks
At two o’clock one Sunday morning in November, the men and women working on the island’s Rocket Range lit up the night with fireworks. There were a host of red petals blazing over the bare, brown hills, a new supernova seen over Conachair. In the calm waters of Village Bay, a thousand brilliant flowers were reflected, multiplying in the stillness, a garden of white, yellow and purple hues displayed and seen.
But it was the noise that truly startled all that lived upon the island. Bangs and blasts occurred, scaring birds from the sea-cliffs. Tiny stars burst into existence, accompanied by the whoosh and rush that gave them birth, chasing sheep away from the places where they grazed. And then the skirling and keening that trailed in the wake of giant rockets, transformed into an echo of the Gaelic psalms once sung in the island church. A lost precentor’s voice took up the sound, leading others in praise;
‘O thugaibh moladh mor do Dhia,
After that, a hush and silence that made all turn to awe and prayer.
Preparing
‘You’ve got to imagine the people are still out there on the island,’ Calum declared at the Rocket Range. ‘The men with their thick, white beards. The women with their shawls and long dark clothes, walking ten yards behind their husbands with a heavy burden on their backs. And, of course, the loud wailing from the place where they go to pray and worship… When you succeed in doing that, you’ll be able to aim a missile direct into their territory, making sure their Headquarters are destroyed.’
He laughed, looking out across the South Uist machair to Village Bay and Conachair in the distance.
‘There’s nothing like a spell at the Range here. It’s the best preparation possible when you’re getting ready for war in Afghanistan or Iran.’
Offshore Banking in St Kilda
We could send our bankers out to undertake
risk-filled investments; send economies in freefall;
practise purest venture capitalism
without endangering us all,
and we’d applaud while watching them perform
flip-flops and double-dips down cliff-tops;
provide funds for sub-prime housing;
place within one basket all their current crop
of eggs, knowing if they stumble,
we would not be held account for them. Instead,
the price would be on their heads.
They’d be the ones who’d fall into the black… or red.
Encounter with a Puffin
Her presence brings some colour to my cheeks
every time I see her. When she peeks
out of darkness. Or flaps past my gaze
those days when life is dismal, making her way
The Guga Stone Page 11