The ferry wades across the kyle. I drive
The car ashore
On to a trim road. A car on Scalpay?
Yes, and a road where never was one before.
The ferrymen's Gaelic wonders who I am
(Not knowing I know it), this man back from the dead.
Who takes the blue-black road (no traffic jam)
From by Craig Lexie over to Bay Head.
A man bows in the North wind, shaping up
His lazybeds.
And through the salt air vagrant peat smells waver
From houses where no houses should be. The sheds
At the curing station have been newly tarred.
Aunt Julia's house has vanished. The Red Well
Has been bulldozed away. But sharp and hard
The church still stands, barring the road to Hell.
A chugging prawn boat slides round Cuddy Point
Where in gale
I spread my batwing jacket and jumped farther
Than I've jumped since. There's where I used to sail
Boats looped from rushes. On the jetty there
I caught eels, cut their heads off and watched them slew
Slow through the water. Ah - Cape Finisterre
I called the point, to show how much I knew.
While Hamish sketches, a crofter tells me that
The Scalpay folk,
Though very intelligent, are not Spinozas...
We walk the Out End road (no need to invoke
That troublemaker, Memory, she's everywhere)
To Laggandoan, greeted all the way -
My city eyeballs prickle; it's hard to bear
With such affection and such gaiety.
Scalpay revisited? - more than Scalpay. I
Have no defence
For half my thought and half my blood is Scalpay.
Against that pure, hardheaded innocence
That shows love without shame, weeps without shame,
Whose every thought is hospitality -
Edinburgh, Edinburgh, you're dark years away.
Scuttering snowflakes riddling the hard wind
Are almost spent
When we reach Johann's house. She fills the doorway,
Sixty years of size and astonishment,
Then laughs and cries and laughs, as she always did
And will (easy glum, easy glow, a friend would say) ...
Scones, oatcakes, herrings from under a bubbling lid.
Then she comes with us to put us on our way.
Hugging my arm in her stronger one, she says,
Fancy me
Walking this road beside my darling Norman!
And what is there to say? ... We look back and see
Her monumental against the flying sky
And I am filled with love and praise and shame
Knowing that I have been, and knowing why,
Diminished and enlarged. Are they the same?