SEVEN-PART POEM WRITTEN IN A LIGHTHOUSE

SEVEN-PART POEM WRITTEN IN A LIGHTHOUSE

1

A restless, rustling north wind pins us down all afternoon.
Weakening light as a squally rain sweeps in off the sea.
A blue and white boat meets the swell head-on.
No one on deck. Its lights glow. In our cliff-top room just
the sound of the wind and you turning pages in your book,
me writing this, looking out into mist and cloud three hundred
feet above waves crashing on black rocks on a day where
a small fishing boat moving slowly north is an event.
This is all we need. The peace between us, as it is.

2

Waves ease into a compromise of calm.
We walk along the cliff-top, find once again
the thousand-year-old nunnery, now just
a rectangle of stones and earth, but its walls
easier to make out after a wet winter.
Gannets glide above us. Fulmars sweep
the cliff-edge. Down on the surface of the sea
a thousand guillemots and razorbills,
making sense of earth, air, water.
I think of the nuns standing on these cliffs
among these banks of thrift, summer coming,
staring into their pasts, their futures, watching
night draw in with a curtain of rain.

3

All but a few gannets and kittiwakes have gone to their roosts
on sheer stacks or faces of warm volcanic cliffs, as we come in
from our late walk in heavy coats and woollen hats.
We eat hake and samphire we bought by the harbour,
drink good wine, watch the darkening sea,
and listen to the wind rise and fall. We play Scrabble,
you win and then sit on the bed with a book on your knees.
You tell me it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but
that you’re not enjoying it. Still, I’ll finish it tonight, you say.

4

We walk down the hill away from the noise of the sea and the birds, head to the small lake.
A heron watches from reeds, rises, waves its wings above the water, settles on the far side.
Two deer break from a cluster of gorse, run as if startled. We watch them, way above,
upwind, as they disappear into the shelter of thick woods planted forty years ago in
honour of a diver who died in the lake, somewhere near the old boathouse gone to ruin.
On the path down we see a rabbit’s leg, eaten down to the bone.

5

The lighthouse keepers’ rectangular garden, overgrown with gorse and hawthorn.
The stone wall is strong but the gate has fallen in. Rabbits and hares come and go.
In this shelter behind the cliffs the keepers must have enjoyed themselves, digging,
planting, keeping weeds down and pulling crops as and when, for dinners
eaten, perhaps in silence after a few quiet words of grace. There must have been
time here, for them as it is for us, a century and more later, when conversation had no relevance compared to the relentless beating of wind and rain and the mesmerising
gliding of birds.

6

A wind farm off the coast. Clear enough with binoculars on a sunny day.
It’s said some sea-birds on their way to their nesting grounds on the cliffs
fly into the whirling blades of the turbines. Others, in avoiding them, lose
their sense of direction. I sit and stare out of the old sash window as two
young swallows settle on the safety rail. The computer says in Auchencrow
the rain will stop shortly and the temperature is thirteen degrees. I don’t
know where Auchencrow is and, when I type it into google,
the internet loses connection.

7

We walk nine miles along the cliff path, there and back.
By the end I can barely put one foot in front of the other.
I get so hot I tie my coat around my waist, loosen my shirt.

The faintest shadow of cloud, that’ll be history watching.
Granite cliffs groan under the weight of the burning sky.
It’s not the job of the cliffs, nor of the birds, to protect us.

Far away the temperature gauge rises above fifty degrees.
Contaminated seas writhe. A flood here, a landslide there.
People drop in the street. Birds fall from leafless trees.