We are not your islanders. We turn

stomachs of good mothers: woman’s wretch 

on a morning vestige. 

We always delivered you. 

Hollow and north. 

Old Norse claims (our children) 

our own. Known since you 

found the lost

shy of iron. Breathing

limbo where there was

nothing. Once, rewilds

love ripped from, twice

freshly frozen

well water. 

Origin of the name 

lays no finger, 

clones itself.

Has to break

before opening. 

We know you don’t know

what comes next. 

Here’s a riddle. 

When do you become 

an island of yourself? 

Three names become stippled seabird eggs,

fishing boats, your tomorrow

washed up together: a maze. 

Smallest wild lives sense 

when something is wrong. 

When the evacuation stops

Kilda’s cliff-heart splinters, steep. 

Two identical gannets forgive again.

We are earlier than you think. Your only heat. 

First wreckage. Dish eyes know 

how to be sturdy. We are not 

happy to have you. 

Lived further than Lundy, predicted 

the last prohibition. Have always been moulting

in this unwanted Archipelago.

We know these mottled brown bellies

don’t outlive grass. Wilting warms 

with early May, the fold of tiny

Gaelic mouths. 

Time rushes out of us, like slow

ewe-ish blood. 

We boom and crash, swell,

boom and crash.

Live smaller and smaller

as two horns curl shorter, 

another thousand years

of resistance. Nothing left 

to graze

but warnings 

scratched through tree trunk circles. 

Across the kempy water: refuge. 

There are lights left on for us. Bleet 

into night’s fine-boned changing. 

What great snow-storms

halve our friends.

Motherhood means 

being left. When you ask 

us to do something:

we will finish it.

Don’t be sorry you came: be sorry 

you forgot how to leave.