Fair Head

She made her bedroom so it didn’t face

the other houses of the clachan, but instead

looked only at the place where sky was a lung-tug

of gravity on the edge of the cliff,

a drop to boulders, granite-spikes, the channel of sea.

This was her retirement.  No more the large house

she couldn’t heat, no more the stairs,

only the two rooms, the scuttle, the knick-knacks,

the breath of the wind in the night and the day.

She’d go as she came, in a bed a foot from the soil,

in a cottage without running water, with the yelp

of the dogs in the field, the odd hovering falcon,

and every so often when the day was clear

the cliff-face and mountains of Scotland.