GRAHAM NIVEN & AMY FERGUSON: Self-Directed Residency, 2015

Bluebells and Bracken.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Saturated light-after-the-rain floods the bothy,
washed clean, separate and perfectly reordered.
Waterfall driven upwards,
spraying the stillness of the stony cliff-face,
ruptured by The Finger of God
in some exultant acknowledgement
of the pivotal power of the skies.

Singing to the sunlight from a stony wall,
blackbird flies low to the nest of bramble brush,
vast enough to accommodate the neighbouring Golden eagle,
a beaver’s lodge anchored in a river of bluebell,
encroaching banks of bracken.

A rigid wooden swordfish pitches and rolls
head-on down the south-west passage of the Sound of Rùm,
one white sail followed by a taught triangle of russet
and I felt I could have been a woman of Eigg,
scores of centuries old, curious to know these skillful seafarers.

Luminous greens, amber, violet and indigo.
Rùm exhales unfurling clouds, building and drawing closer
’til all is mist and squall.