Published in Dreich

Ailsa Craig

The sunken part of this green marble egg
must be displacing half the Firth of Clyde.


A no-man's land of smashed rock lines its shore
and saves its mossy trackway from the tide.


Gannets screech – eternal as the weather.
A pipit cocks a bright, inviting eye


and flits down thoroughfares of rabbit dung
among the pungent ragwort and the heather.


Battered to a nub, the castle seems
more recently inhabited than even


cottages still propped by sills and beams.
The rusted residue of occupation


and enterprise is no more felt as litter
than if it were the flint tools of a caveman.