Our silences become the better part of us

Towards High Street from Place Fell

After Norfolk admin I was keen to get out for some air. I hadn't intended to come here but wondered if I headed up Martindale way I might see deer (I didn't, although there was a herd of stones that I was convinced were deer for sometime ... but there is only so long a deer can meditate motionless). I found myself being drawn on and upwards to the windy summit of Place Fell; continuing to be held by Eliot's 'still point', absurdly fearful of failing mobile, and rather liking this poem of Helen Mort's ....

Shetland

Wind-whittled, turned on the sea’s lathe too long,
built by a craftsman who can’t leave it alone:
the trees scoured off, the houses pared down
to their stones, the animals less skin than bone.

We walk to Windhoose, find a barn even the ghosts
have left, a sheep’s spine turning on a string,
a name reduced to nothing but it’s sound.
Our silences become the better part of us.


the sound of ravens

a raven gulps as it soars overhead
in that peculiar way that ravens do
I like to think it is a gulp of happiness
I like to think there is an atom of you
in a single barb of it's dark feather
connecting wing to air
making that moment of flight possible
or, in the vibration of that otherworldly sound
that echoes out across the valley,
carried across time.