From here you can see things further out
as if you were among them.
Oyster catchers’ yip yip yeeeble yeeeble yeeeble
echoes differently
up these stone cliffs, and the sea
sips and gurgles and tips
sideways into cave-slots. Mists fall and rise
and dolphins turn half-cartwheels that look like whole ones.
They make their own island, a patch of dark, disturbed water
in the sea’s white field.
You have left where you are without really leaving
and can go back
any time you want, carefully along the spine of rock:
there is no boat to catch
though the weather may yet catch you.
A peninsula off a peninsula off a peninsula
which, arguably, is off a fourth, a whole country.
Sea on three sides, far down
down from these green-lichened edges.
Stay long enough
and the sea will fall still further away.
The rock emerging off the island’s tall islets
will acquire little ones of its own.
Drapes of sea mist accentuate the islets’ bulbousness
like whales nose to nose.
Ripples interweave and the sea flexes its larger muscles.
You sit among sea campion, sea spurge and sea pinks
and dried lumps of sheep shit,
foam-light to hold,
nothing inside when you split their dark coating
but old grass smelling faintly of hay.
What a strange journey the grass has been on.
Don’t, don’t ever leave
before you have to.
A black-backed gull lifts out of nowhere –
face to face, you are both surprised.
____________
Fiona Moore's first collection The Distal Point (HappenStance) was shortlisted for the 2019 TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney prizes. She is on Magma's editorial board. She has been living in the Western Isles for the last year.