the blue boat

900 miles later in Wester Ross: its lochs and glens, deserted bays, lyrical place names, sea air throbbing with selkie song, land soaked with Celtic yearning...

At Plockton

The same surely the same blue boat now

wallowing in water and battered gunwales

peeled to the wood still tethered in the arms

of its mirror-twin safe in the lee of the little bay –

a quarter century and 18,000 tides 
under its keel along the way to here 

where I pull up and stand in dreichy mist drifting in

across the islet with its rhododendrons

not yet purpling the hill the silver belly

of a whale-blue shower sliding my way

and there the barnacle-crusted creels

and turf-roofed bothy and further out 

that horizon    the silence where no 

hint of you still lingers except as 

particle or wave, where I let you go

– Roselle Angwin