layer on layer into blue

Back home in Edinburgh now, after a thoroughly enjoyable week up in Ullapool ...

... of course, I did buy (just one!) volume of Poetry to mark the trip - the pictured 2011 collection by Andrew Greig :-)

And so; here is Greig's marvelous poem, taken from within, about how mountains often remain (in so many ways) in our mind's eye:


Tom Ban Mor

The breeze failed, Tom Ban Mor
grew tall. Rock, turf, heather stacked
layer on layer into blue
till the mountain fell over flat,
stretched unbroken to my feet
by the shore of Loch Glascarnoch.

On reflection it appears,
look where you will, this world
presents itself in duplicate,
one rising away from us,
the other laid our way.
Before you flick aside this hour

like a burning cigarette then drive,
it seems you too live twice,
once as participant, again as witness -
see how autumn bracken doubles
and two Tom Ban Mors pivot
from rusty hinges on that far shore.

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Andrew Greig (1951 - )

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