On Ronas Hill, Shetland, in midsummer

 

Red stones aglow in midsummer sun

on a rock set in a fishful, oil-rich sea,

resting awhile, a little while, in the warmth, the calm here so rarely found.

This rock, it seems, is very old and so far from its birth that it can tell of heat and cold, of collision and division, of new worlds and of old…

and yet it is here and I am here and many more are here

and here it will be and we will be, drifting just a little to journey’s end.

Turning all comes to view bounded by sea horizons and dark edged coast, drifting….

and here I was and here he was, some special link, some cells, some DNA, some half-forgotten thought, some sense of always having been……

now captured by our digital eyes for their imagined memory.

 

This poem was written a few weeks ago after sharing the experience of being in Shetland at midsummer some years ago with a Friend. She asked why the stones are red and this led me to do some research. I discovered that  over the past 700 million years Shetland has ‘travelled’ from somewhere near the South Pole to its present position and that the islands are made of rocks from every era from the Precambrian to the Carboniferous, including the ‘red’  granite of Ronas Hill. I was born in Shetland quite close to Ronas Hill and my father loved the island where he spent his first appointment as a Methodist Minister.