Meeting the Lingering Dead.

A Confounded Letter of Luskintyre beach on the Western Isle of Harris in Scotland.

 

As the rain begins its patterned prayer all my dead and God ride and run in time along a long western strand. Where tide races myth magic and sky sea merge shot colours not just once but for always.

Magic enfolds its nature and the spell that transfixes me here lies way under and over the visual.

It is much more than you can truthfully see. It is the exposure that happens seldom and only then when the tides and currents are right. Truth is finally caught in curled waves providing the prayer missal and the Madonna colours you play with.

Rocks are internal organ coloured and textured, screaming bright in this flat storm light. The desert and smooth spaces in between are occasionally rippled with eroded musical lines and more rhythmic notes.

White feathers skip their erratic counterpoint to hissing and clockwork time. A transit of an erratic Venus across a grainy and changing sky. The spidered cuneiform marks of sand hopped waders mark this gull shaped missive. Properly punctuated just here and there with droppings of pure gospel.

Ghost grass hair lifts and tumbles across slight red cliffs of undercut where lie the remains of old preserved men and their mutiple stone cutting tools.

Machair hidden sounds croak corncrake and call to each other across wind bent distance.

Wish hush bright slide, form sound mathematics in brief stony stories under your feet. Read them rich and rippled, right and control marked through the soul.

Cries of screeching scorching screaming death through the wilful grey. Turning tossing twisting tumbling in ritual white feathered mating just for the constant joy. Catch the slide and stall into pecks of religious gold light flashing.

Smooth in shining backs humped from coming waves. Wet with blowing steam and expiring alien thoughts. Cut at right angles to the water lines above and so below. Breach in each to new elemental limits. Old blood on the water in shifts down a slide of ancient green stone.

Age the cragged cracked heights above as they fall rightly down into depths that still can be seen long after looking. Stone waterfalls glistening in blue clear patches of occasional sunlight. Standing in stillness some broken shards of these mountains follow ancient circles that remind and still rejoice.

Here you can love, so know this place and linger, meeting all your joyful dead.

Author's Note

One of my favourite places in the world. Photograph is mine. The changes in tense are deliberate.
The Machair is the increasingly rare patch of land between the beach and the peat bogs further inland on some Hebridean islands and the west coast of Scotland. It is home to many rare species of plants, animals and birds.
There is a ruined whaling station just to the north of Luskentyre once run by Lord Leverhulme. There are many prehistoric stone circles at Callenish on Lewis, the next, (joined) island to Harris

Reviews

[TL Boehm]

WOW. There is something that pulls a soul in the place where earth and sea and sky meet. I'm so landlocked I don't experience it - but when I am in that place - it is as though it washes over me exponentially as if thousands of moments jostle for one single flash of understanding. This poem captures that - the transient meeting the permanent - in grains of sand...a feather - the sky and the curve of the earth.

[Ken Simm.]

Thank you Tammy. I think everyone who experiences Luskintyre feels that pull, that transient moment you spek of so eloquently. I thank you so much for the Wow.

[W.k.kortas]

Life and death, all our yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows all interwoven deftly and with no small touch of magic. Without love, there cannot be life; without life, no death and onward and onward together, amen.

[Leslie Philibert]

Fine description with a a whole lot of lyrical beauty and poetic skill, excellent sparse punctuation that makes the text more powerful.Good work.

[Donald Meikle]

You paint with words on the walls that keep me sane

[Gandré]

I just thought, you don*t use commas. Interesting. The rich, romantic imaginary makes even a dark prose poem of yours shining special. This was written a way that one wants to visit there.

[dukovan]

You make your own patterns. You just gotta look.

[Ed Hart]

i never enter your 'confounded' states but that immediately i'm entranced and altered...this is wonderful, musical, raw, and pure simm magic

[Donald Meikle]

Wirral? The pic is great. The write is better.