
Soay Sheep Know
by Molly Knox
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.
Molly Knox is an MA Ethnomusicology student at Durham University. They are a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net nominee. Her work can be read in The Braag and Ink, Sweat and Tears, and is forthcoming in Issue 88 of Magma.