SUILVEN
I only occasionally write poems nowadays and am unsure if I can call them poems, but I have some short pieces of writing that sometimes make me smile or give me memories I would like to share. Here is one; from Lochinver, when a group of us spent a week writing. I mainly hid in my room working on START. I certainly didn’t go up SUILVEN! (By the way the photo has nothing to do with SUILVEN but it is of a mountain, almost!)
SUILVEN
For Colin.
1.
The crunch of boots on gravel
And the sound of birdsong.
Sitting below Suilven
Batting away the clegs
2.
I would like to be a mountain man
A sea man
A wild man
But really I am a
Coffee shop frequenter
And a
Television watcher
3.
When you feel airy and warm and have just enough sun to have to screw up your eyes to see the mountain and there is nothing at all to do.
Then heaven beckons.
4.
Once I would have played a ballet on the rock and been watched from below by a flock of observers. Now I pray my brother keeps away from mountains and that his wife throws away his ice axe and avalanche kit.
5.
I want to be alone with
Dragonflies
And
Swallows
And
Great black crows.
I want to sit on a rock and ponder
How to make a foreign place
Home.
7.
When I am dead I would like my bones to be scattered among the rocks like a bird pecked, fox riven sheep.
I would like someone to look at my skull with curiosity
Just as I stared at the airman’s boots on Ben Loyal
Maybe they would take one of my vertebrae
And add it to their collection of wood and stone
On the window ledge at home.
8.
When I look at Suilven it is a huge presence
When I take a picture
It is just a wee blip on the edge of the screen.
2014
(Photo:By Carmen Hill, where DASH saw the deer and went frantic. Dec 2020.)
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