Eclipse
You charged the Galloway hills,
a colt let loose,
your joy flaring back at me
through the bracken and bog.
I followed,
mud clutching my boots,
but my heart
already running beside you.
You climbed
like the sky had called your name,
each step a promise
I couldn’t help but believe.
I hadn’t wanted to go.
But you turned,
smiling like the sun
had chosen us,
and I came.
At the peak,
we stood,
your hand in mine,
the world flung wide
like a vow.
Love wasn’t far.
It was there,
between us,
bright as the wind
and just as wild.
And behind us,
the storm
held its breath,
waiting
for the light
to pass.
The Ascent
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High summer, and the sky is a held breath,
blue as a blade. We begin
where the sheepfold crumbles,
stone-ringed silence,
a doorway still shaped for passage.
Across the glen, saw-logs lie like felled giants,
their resin bleeding into the heat.
A white caravan glints,
ghost of a man’s labour,
or a sentinel watching us climb.
We move through the wreckage of forest,
clear-fell and sapling,
heather snagging at our boots
like the past tugging at the present.
You laugh, and it echoes
off the bones of Black Benwee.
The hill does not yield.
It tests us,
with shale that shifts,
with grasses that hide the holes.
But we are together,
and that is enough
until it isn’t.
At the crest, the Minnigaffs open,
a glacial hush,
valley scooped by ice and time.
We stand in the wind’s mouth,
your hand in mine,
and I feel the old ache:
how love, like weather,
can turn.
You point to a kestrel
hovering,
held by invisible violence.
I nod,
but I am watching you he way a hunter watches
what he cannot bear to kill.
We descend in silence.
The ree is behind us,
the caravan gone.
Only the logs remain,
waiting to be taken.
