Headlines

Coconut discovered in Glen Canisp

Step classes proscribed within a ten mile radius of Suilven

Silence unearthED

 

 

Plentitude

Is a good word.

 

Everything is perfect

Climbing steadily, steadily,

there comes a point when he become aware

of silence.

Turning then

to gaze back down the steepness of the talus,

across the cnoc and lochan muir

he can still hear the River Inver roaring,

still hear Glen Canisp’s cuckoos clowning in the wood

the peep peep of a buzzard chick beneath the Caistel,

the wind, the trickle of the burn .

And it comes to him that silence is his own.

 

Crossing the bealach

The call of a different cuckoo.

 

On balmier climes

West Highland rain is the best rain in the world.

If you must have rain – choose this.

 

And nothing thrives in a desert.

Doonfa and sclither

Despite the strenuous exertion

It helps to remember that

On the way up

Gravity is not actually trying to kill you.

 

 

Boon companion

It is starting to dawn on me.

The water only joins me on my journey

on the way down.

 

 

Prophetic insight

If you must make an entrance

that’s the one.

Picking your way off a mountain in a storm,

drenched, a tad dishevelled.

It helps to have something to say for yourself –

ideally scratched out on stone

for it is an immutable law of poetry and mountains

that you can’t recall the best lines at the bottom.

 

 

Reversal of fortunes

I was going to say I have never seen the muir so dry.

This was true on the walk in.

 

Cheeky wee bastards

As I recover the track in the pelting rain -

Glen Canisp’s cuckoos still mocking me

 

John Bolland, May 2007