Cauldhame Road

by Aidan Semmens

A banshee wind’s incoming from the western sea
throwing salt rain by handfuls against the glass,
bowing the window with its desperate gusts.

And then, as startlingly as it came, it’s gone,
fragmentary rainbows chasing the grey
across the pasture and away over Viewfield.

Suffolk and Cheviot silently observe
from behind dry-stane dyke, flat stones
laid course by course long enough since

for capstones to be richly silvered with lichen,
the lee side sheltering scrub willow, fuchsia wands,
crocosmia shoots. From the brow of the road

the view extends over lochs, braes and byres,
from the monument at Marwick thumbing the horizon
to the distant masts of Wideford, the lit-up flare of Flotta,

the ferry’s wake arrowing to Graemsay. A wide sky
scratched by skeins of geese, somewhere overhead
the ascending notes of an early lark,

descant to the distant long-wave bass
of rocky cliffs impeding an unseen sea.