A Legend Among Lightkeepers

by Donald S Murray

Great Uncle Lachlann would regale
us with salt-riddled tales
tall as the tower
he served on, long as hours
he watched and tended light.
We would spend nights
listening to his voice boom
out stories to a crowded room
where some flashed anxious grins
while others shifted back and forth in winds
to which he kept returning - a maelstrom of a kind
that inundated nerve and mind
as surely as salt water overwhelmed that rock
we journeyed towards while he talked,
a stark and narrow stretch of stone
to which we were all exiled
those weeks he swirled round to visit us
in our family home.